(Mumbai September 1st) Agentic Commerce and Agentic Marketplaces: Towards Agentic Kumbh Mela
Building the Agentic Commerce and Marketplaces
Tuesday, September 1st | Mumbai
AI agents are beginning to change how consumers discover, compare, purchase, book, and transact. The Kumbh Mela offers a unique opportunity to explore what agentic commerce at population scale could look like in the real world.
This is not simply a discussion about putting existing e-commerce inside an AI assistant. The larger opportunity is to help define the marketplace in which consumer agents and merchant/service agents can discover each other, transact, coordinate, and establish trust.
Join us for an intimate working session on KumbhDoot Commerce—the commerce layer of KumbhDoot, designed to help visitors use AI agents to discover and interact with services, merchants, marketplaces, mobility providers, travel services, food, accommodation, and other offerings during the Kumbh Mela.
We are inviting leaders from technology companies, e-commerce, ONDC, marketplaces, payments, mobility, travel, logistics, retail, and digital infrastructure to help shape this ecosystem.
The session will focus on:
What should an agentic marketplace for Kumbh Mela look like?
How should consumer agents discover merchants, services, offers, and other agents?
What open protocols and interfaces are needed for discovery, identity, trust, payments, consent, and transactions?
How can ONDC, marketplaces, commerce platforms, and technology providers participate?
What can we learn from early KumbhDoot prototypes and pilots already underway?
What are the highest-value pilots we can launch before and during the Kumbh Mela?
The goal is practical: bring together the organizations that could power this ecosystem, define the initial technical architecture and protocols, identify early pilots, and create pathways for companies to participate in the emerging KumbhDoot marketplace.
Come help define how agentic commerce works before millions of consumers begin using agents to interact with the physical and digital world.
About Prof. Ramesh Raskar, MIT
Ramesh Raskar is an Associate Professor at the MIT Media Lab, where he directs the Camera Culture research group and leads the work on Networked AI Agents to build the "Internet of AI Agents." He is the founder of Project NANDA (Networked AI Agents in Decentralized Architecture), which is tackling the four infrastructure choke points of the agentic web: registry, credentials, interoperability, and attestation. His research vision holds that the next frontier of artificial intelligence lies not in ever larger centralized models but in a world of personal, edge based agents that people own, customize, and connect.
Beyond academia, he has worked on special research projects at Google [X], Facebook, and Apple, has co-founded and advised several startups, launched REDX.io as a platform for young innovators exploring AI for impact, and holds more than 100 US patents. He is widely recognised as one of the leading global voices on decentralized AI and the governance of the emerging agentic web, arguing that agentic commerce faces the same fork the World Wide Web once did, between closed walled gardens and a neutral, open infrastructure.
About Project NANDA
Project NANDA is building the foundational infrastructure for the Open Agentic Web, an open ecosystem where autonomous AI agents can securely discover one another, verify capabilities, communicate and collaborate across organizations and platforms.
Its work spans:
Agent discovery and interoperability
Trust, identity and verification
Agent-to-agent communication
Mobile and edge AI agents
Open standards for distributed intelligence
Civic and sovereign AI
Enterprise adoption of autonomous AI systems
The project is also developing NandaTown, an open developer sandbox where builders can experiment with real-world agent discovery, coordination and orchestration.
Research: https://nanda.mit.edu
Open Source: https://projectnanda.org
Developer Sandbox: https://nandatown.projectnanda.org
About KumbhDoot
KumbhDoot is an AI-powered digital companion for the Kumbh Mela, designed to help pilgrims and visitors navigate services, information, commerce, mobility, safety, and government support through trusted AI agents. Built as an open ecosystem rather than a single closed app, KumbhDoot aims to connect consumers with verified service providers, merchants, public agencies, and digital platforms—creating a practical testbed for how AI agents can safely operate at population scale in the real world.