As India emerges as a global hub for applied artificial intelligence, OpenAI has partnered with Pine Labs to integrate AI-driven inference into fintech companies’ payment stacks and automate payment and invoice workflows, which the companies claim could help accelerate AI-driven commerce in India.
The partnership will see Pine Labs embed OpenAI’s application programming interface, a software tool that allows businesses to embed AI into their existing systems, within its payments and commerce infrastructure, the companies announced Thursday. The whole purpose is to enable AI-assisted payment, reconciliation, and billing workflows.
The deal underscores OpenAI’s broader efforts to expand its footprint in India, one of its fastest-growing markets, as the company aims to move beyond being primarily known as the maker of ChatGPT and incorporate its technology into education, enterprise, and infrastructure. Earlier this week, OpenAI partnered with India’s leading engineering, medical, and design institutions to bring AI tools to higher education, betting that India’s large developer base and over 1 billion internet users will play a central role in the next phase of AI adoption.
Chief Executive Officer B. Amrish Rau said Pine Labs is already leveraging AI internally to automate parts of its payments and settlement process, reducing the time it takes to process daily payments from hours to minutes. The Noida-based company used to rely on manual checks by dozens of employees to process funds from multiple banks before the market opened each day, but now a majority of the workflow is handled by AI-driven systems, he said in an interview.
For Pine Labs, the partnership is aimed at extending AI-driven efficiencies beyond internal operations to retail and enterprise customers, starting with B2B use cases such as invoice processing, payments, and payment orchestration, Lau told TechCrunch. He said the company expects to accelerate its adoption into B2B workflows, where AI agents can handle large volumes of repetitive financial tasks under predefined rules, before similar capabilities reach consumer payments.
“People talk about retail AI, but the bigger impact of all of this is real efficiency gains, especially in B2B,” Rau says. “If you look at invoicing and payments, these are workflows where agents can actually drive the process end-to-end, where adoption can happen more quickly.”
Lau said that while the rollout of more autonomous, agent-driven payment workflows will move faster in overseas markets where regulations already allow such transactions, in India adoption is likely to be gradual, with a focus on AI-assisted commerce rather than fully agent-driven payments. He said Pine Labs is already prototyping agent-driven payments in parts of the Middle East and Southeast Asia, even though Indian regulations call for tighter controls on how payments are approved.
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For OpenAI, the partnership aims to move beyond consumer-facing tools and incorporate its models into mass regulated workflows, providing a path deeper into India’s payments and enterprise ecosystems. Lau said the partnership is aimed at increasing merchant connectivity and expanding Pine Labs’ role from a payment processor to a broader commerce platform, with increased transaction volumes leading to increased revenue over time.
Pine Labs has partnered with more than 980,000 merchants, 716 consumer brands and 177 financial institutions and said it has processed more than 6 billion transactions worth more than 11.4 trillion rupees (approximately $126 billion), according to a prospectus published last year. The fintech operates in 20 countries, including Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, parts of Africa, the United Arab Emirates, and the US, and the OpenAI partnership can span both Indian and international markets.
Lau said the partnership does not include any revenue sharing between the companies, and Pine Labs will not receive a cut if merchants choose to incorporate OpenAI’s tools. “We’ve made it completely independent of each other. Anything related to payments and payment services we benefit from, and anything related to OpenAI revenue goes to them,” he said.
The arrangement is also non-exclusive, Lau added. He compared this to OpenAI’s partnership with Stripe in the US, and said Pine Labs remains open to working with other AI providers.
Rau said that as Pine Labs integrates AI more deeply into its payment systems, it is building additional layers of security and compliance around AI-driven workflows to ensure sensitive merchant and consumer transaction data is protected. He said the company remains focused on ensuring transactions are secure and compliant, even as more workflows are automated by AI.
Pine Labs’ interest in AI-driven commerce builds on previous research through its Setu division, which has experimented with agent-driven bill payment experiences using chatbots such as ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. Separately, India also began piloting direct consumer payments through AI chatbots last year.
The new announcement comes as India hosts the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi. There, global AI companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Google will showcase their latest capabilities, while Indian startups will demo AI applications aimed at large-scale deployment across sectors such as finance, healthcare and education.
