OpenAI

New Delhi – OpenAI is deepening its presence in India’s rapidly expanding fintech sector through a new partnership with Pine Labs, aiming to integrate AI-driven reasoning directly into payment workflows. The collaboration, announced Thursday, seeks to automate tasks like settlement and invoicing, potentially accelerating the adoption of “agentic commerce” – where AI agents can autonomously handle financial transactions – across the country.

The tie-up underscores India’s growing ambition to turn into a global hub for applied artificial intelligence. Pine Labs will embed OpenAI’s application programming interfaces (APIs) into its existing payments and commerce infrastructure, enabling AI-assisted processes. This move comes as India’s digital payments ecosystem continues to boom, with annual transaction volumes exceeding 180 billion and the broader fintech sector projected to reach a valuation of $1.5 trillion by 2026, according to industry estimates according to Pine Labs.

This isn’t OpenAI’s first foray into the Indian market this month. Earlier this week, the company partnered with leading engineering, medical, and design institutions to integrate AI tools into higher education, recognizing the potential of India’s large developer base and over a billion internet users in shaping the future of AI adoption.

Pine Labs Streamlines Operations with Internal AI Implementation

Pine Labs isn’t new to leveraging AI. According to CEO B Amrish Rau, the company has already implemented AI internally to automate parts of its settlement and reconciliation processes. This has dramatically reduced the time required to clear daily settlements, from hours to minutes. Previously, dozens of employees manually checked funds from multiple banks before market open, a process now largely handled by AI-driven systems.

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 told CNBC-TV18 that B2B workflows, with their high volume of repetitive tasks and predefined rules, are likely to see faster adoption than consumer-facing payments.

“People talk about retail AI, but the bigger impact of all of Here’s really efficiency improvement, especially in B2B,” Rau said. “If you look at invoicing and settlement, those are workflows where agents can actually drive the process end to end, and that’s where adoption can happen faster.”

Regulatory Landscape and Global Expansion

While the rollout of fully autonomous, agent-led payment workflows is progressing more rapidly in overseas markets with more permissive regulations, India is expected to adopt a more gradual approach, focusing on AI-assisted commerce. Pine Labs is currently prototyping agent-driven payments in parts of the Middle East and Southeast Asia, while navigating stricter payment authorization controls in India.

For OpenAI, the partnership provides a crucial entry point into India’s complex payments and enterprise ecosystem, allowing it to move beyond its consumer-facing image and embed its models into high-volume, regulated workflows. Rau stated that the collaboration aims to increase merchant loyalty and expand Pine Labs’ role beyond a simple payment processor to a broader commerce platform, ultimately driving higher transaction volumes and revenue.

Pine Labs’ Reach and the Non-Exclusive Agreement

Pine Labs currently works with over 980,000 merchants, 716 consumer brands, and 177 financial institutions, having processed more than 6 billion cumulative transactions valued at over ₹11.4 trillion (approximately $126 billion) as reported by The Economic Times. The fintech operates in 20 countries, including Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, parts of Africa, the UAE, and the U.S., extending the potential reach of the OpenAI partnership internationally.

Notably, the partnership does not involve revenue sharing. Pine Labs will not grab a cut if merchants choose to integrate OpenAI’s tools, with OpenAI retaining revenue generated directly from its services. Rau emphasized that the arrangement is non-exclusive, drawing a parallel to OpenAI’s partnership with Stripe in the U.S., and confirming Pine Labs’ openness to collaborating with other AI providers.

Pine Labs is likewise prioritizing security and compliance, building additional layers around AI-driven workflows to protect sensitive merchant and consumer data as it integrates AI more deeply into its systems. The company’s Setu unit has already experimented with agent-led bill payment experiences using chatbots like ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, and India piloted consumer payments through AI chatbots last year.

The announcement coincides with India’s AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, where OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are showcasing their latest AI capabilities alongside Indian startups focused on large-scale AI deployment across various sectors.

As AI continues to evolve, the collaboration between OpenAI and Pine Labs represents a significant step towards realizing the potential of agentic commerce in India. The focus will likely remain on refining AI-assisted workflows and navigating the regulatory landscape to unlock the full benefits of AI-driven financial transactions.

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