OpenAI and Pine Labs Partner to Drive AI-Powered Commerce in India

As India aims to establish itself as a global hub for applied artificial intelligence, OpenAI has deepened its presence in the country through a strategic partnership with Pine Labs. The collaboration will integrate AI-driven reasoning into Pine Labs’ payments infrastructure, automating settlement and invoicing workflows and potentially accelerating AI-led commerce within India and beyond.

Expanding AI Capabilities in India’s Fintech Sector

The partnership, announced on Thursday, will notice Pine Labs embed OpenAI’s application programming interfaces (APIs) into its existing payments and commerce infrastructure. This integration aims to enable AI-assisted settlement, reconciliation and invoicing processes. The move signifies OpenAI’s broader strategy to expand its footprint in India, one of its fastest-growing markets, extending beyond its well-known ChatGPT to encompass education, enterprise, and infrastructure solutions. TechCrunch reported on the deal.

Pine Labs’ Internal AI Adoption and Future Expansion

Pine Labs has already begun leveraging AI internally to streamline its settlement and reconciliation procedures, reducing processing times from hours to minutes. According to B Amrish Rau, Chief Executive Officer of Pine Labs, the company previously relied on manual checks by dozens of employees to process funds from multiple banks before market open. This workflow is now largely automated through AI-driven systems. TechCrunch

The partnership with OpenAI is intended to extend these efficiencies to Pine Labs’ merchants and corporate clients, initially focusing on business-to-business (B2B) applications such as invoice processing, settlements, and payments orchestration. Rau highlighted that faster adoption is anticipated in B2B workflows, where AI agents can manage large volumes of repetitive financial tasks under predefined rules, before similar capabilities are implemented in consumer-facing payments.

Agentic Commerce and Global Reach

Pine Labs and OpenAI are pioneering what they call “agentic commerce,” where AI systems can make limited financial decisions autonomously, simplifying financial management for businesses. The Times of India reports that the upgraded systems will analyze transactions, predict needs, and automatically execute routine financial tasks within established safeguards.

Even as India is expected to see a gradual adoption of AI-assisted commerce due to regulatory considerations, Pine Labs is already prototyping agent-driven payments in parts of the Middle East and Southeast Asia, where regulations are more permissive. TechCrunch

Strategic Implications for Both Companies

For OpenAI, the partnership provides a pathway to deeper integration within India’s payments and enterprise ecosystem, moving beyond consumer-facing tools and embedding its models into high-volume, regulated workflows. For Pine Labs, the collaboration aims to increase merchant loyalty and expand its role from a payments processor to a comprehensive commerce platform, potentially driving higher transaction volumes and incremental revenue. TechCrunch

Pine Labs currently serves over 980,000 merchants, 716 consumer brands, and 177 financial institutions, having processed over 6 billion transactions totaling over ₹11.4 trillion (approximately $126 billion). TechCrunch The fintech company operates across 20 countries, including Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, parts of Africa, the UAE, and the U.S., extending the reach of the OpenAI partnership to both Indian and international markets.

Partnership Details and Future Development

The partnership between Pine Labs and OpenAI does not involve revenue sharing. Pine Labs will benefit from improvements to payment and payment services, while OpenAI will retain revenue generated from its tools. TechCrunch The arrangement is non-exclusive, and Pine Labs remains open to collaborating with other AI providers, similar to OpenAI’s partnership with Stripe in the U.S.

Pine Labs is also focused on building additional security and compliance layers around AI-driven workflows to protect sensitive merchant and consumer data as AI becomes more integrated into its payments systems. This builds upon earlier work through its Setu unit, which has experimented with agent-led bill payment experiences using chatbots like ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. TechCrunch

The announcement coincides with India’s AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, where global AI companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, are showcasing their latest capabilities alongside Indian startups demonstrating AI applications for large-scale deployment across sectors like finance, healthcare, and education.