Eternal's Goyal Defends Against AI Disruption as Zomato Builds Agentic Ordering—With No Indian Legal Safety Net

Deepinder Goyal, co-founder of Eternal (formerly Zomato), is publicly dismissive of the threat AI poses to his company's dominance—while simultaneously building the very infrastructure that would enable AI agents to transact on users' behalf. In the Q4FY26 shareholder letter released April 28, Goyal argues that "AI is our friend, not a threat," citing Google's failed attempts to capture transactional behaviour through general-purpose interfaces like Flights, Hotels, and Maps. "Booking.com is still here. Expedia is still here. Amazon is still here," he wrote, using the argument that vertical apps with entrenched user habits resist displacement. Yet Goyal stops short of declaring the threat impossible: "If something similar didn't work in the past, it doesn't mean it won't work in the future."

Eternal has expanded its OpenAI partnership and developed a system enabling AI to place food orders directly for users. The company has also joined a live agentic payments platform operating on this principle. The critical gap Goyal does not address: Indian law contains no framework for assigning liability when agentic AI systems act incorrectly, fail, or cause harm on a user's behalf. This absence of regulatory clarity creates exposure for any company deploying autonomous commerce agents at scale—a tension between technological ambition and legal infrastructure that remains unresolved in India's current regulatory environment.

The contradiction between Goyal's public reassurances and Eternal's aggressive agentic commerce build raises questions about how the company intends to manage regulatory risk as these systems scale. India's legal system has not yet confronted the question of AI agent liability, leaving firms like Eternal to operate in a grey zone where consumer protection frameworks were designed for human-directed transactions, not autonomous algorithmic agency.