Nykaa has signed a multi-year partnership agreement with OpenAI to list its beauty and fashion storefronts as connected apps in ChatGPT, allowing users in India to get product recommendations through conversations in ChatGPT, before being routed to Nykaa’s app or website to complete a purchase.

When a shopper asks ChatGPT for skincare for sensitive skin, a wedding outfit or a fragrance, ChatGPT draws on Nykaa’s catalogue to respond and routes the shopper to Nykaa to complete the purchase. This gives Nykaa’s House of Nykaa labels and the third-party brands on its platform another channel to reach buyers.

Nykaa will also deploy OpenAI’s tools internally. It plans to use ChatGPT Enterprise across marketing, customer support, legal, finance, supply chain and operations, and the coding agent Codex in its engineering teams. The partnership builds on Nykaa’s existing in-house AI features:

• Skin Scan, for skin analysis;
• Virtual Try-On, for testing products digitally;
• Ask Nykaa and the AI Fashion Stylist for conversational recommendations.

The companies will roll out the collaboration in phases over a multi-year term and have not disclosed financial details. Nykaa serves over 55 million online customers and runs more than 300 physical stores as of 31 March 2026.

Nykaa Chief Product and Technology Officer (CPTO) Rajesh Uppalapati called search-and-scroll shopping “a transitional technology” and the future “conversational, agentic, and deeply personal.” OpenAI India enterprise sales head Nitin Bawankule said AI is changing how people discover products in categories like beauty and fashion.

Why it matters: Under the deal, ChatGPT handles discovery while Nykaa keeps the sale. The shopper’s query and the back-and-forth that narrows it down happen inside ChatGPT; Nykaa’s own app and site, the channels it built its customer data on, enter only at the end, when the shopper arrives to buy. The discovery layer, where buying decisions actually form, sits with OpenAI. That split mirrors where AI shopping is heading: OpenAI said in March 2026 that it would leave checkout to merchants and focus ChatGPT on product discovery.

Sitting at that layer gives OpenAI control over which products a query surfaces. OpenAI says its results are organic and ranked by relevance, but that control has already drawn a legal challenge in India: IndiaMART moved the Calcutta High Court against OpenAI in December 2025, alleging ChatGPT left it out of responses while surfacing rival marketplaces.

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