Pine Labs has announced a partnership with OpenAI to embed artificial intelligence capabilities into its payments infrastructure, making it the first Indian payments provider to collaborate with the U.S.-based AI firm on ChatGPT integrations. The alliance, revealed at the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, aims to develop what the companies describe as “agentic commerce,” where AI systems can autonomously handle financial workflows.
The integration will allow Pine Labs to use OpenAI’s API models across its payments and commerce platforms to automate processes such as settlement, reconciliation, and invoicing. The move is designed to transition from traditional rule based systems to intelligent solutions capable of contextual reasoning within established compliance frameworks.
“For decades, commerce has been built on passive systems that simply follow instructions,” said Pine Labs CEO B Amrish Rau. “At Pine Labs, we are moving beyond that era to build an active, intelligent layer for business.” OpenAI’s Managing Director of International, Oliver Jay, said the collaboration focuses on enabling AI systems to move from providing information to executing actions within financial workflows.
The initiative builds on India’s digital payments infrastructure, including innovations such as UPI Reserve Pay. Pine Labs’ subsidiary, Setu, had earlier launched agentic bill-payment experiences through ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude in December 2025, automating retrieval and anomaly detection in utility bills.
According to the company’s prospectus, Pine Labs operates across 20 countries and serves over 980,000 merchants, 716 consumer brands, and 177 financial institutions. Rau told TechCrunch that early adoption is expected in business-to-business workflows, with prototypes already being tested in the Middle East and Southeast Asia.
The partnership is non-exclusive and involves no revenue sharing between Pine Labs and OpenAI, similar to OpenAI’s collaboration with Stripe in the U.S. Pine Labs remains open to working with other AI providers. Its shares rose in early trading following the announcement.
