How AI is rewiring Indian ecommerce

If you have ordered a kurta for your parents because the app confused them, or helped the domestic help shop online because she could not find her way past the login, then this is probably not news to you: online shopping in India still leaves a lot of people out.

A report by the National Council of Applied Economic Research, released in June, gives a sense of how wide this exclusion runs. Among households that do use digital services, about one in five, or 20.4%, still need someone else’s help to get things done online. The gender gap is just as telling, with only 35.6% of working-age women using the internet as against 57.6% of men, and when it comes to people over 60, the share drops all the way to 9.4%. And all of this in a country that had crossed a billion internet subscriptions by 2025.