India is rapidly positioning itself as a global leader in applied artificial intelligence, a vision underscored by a significant partnership between OpenAI and fintech firm Pine Labs. This collaboration aims to integrate AI-driven reasoning directly into Pine Labs’ extensive payments stack, thereby automating critical workflows such as settlement and invoicing. Both companies believe this strategic move will play a pivotal role in accelerating AI-led commerce not only within India but also in broader international markets.

The essence of the partnership involves Pine Labs embedding OpenAI’s application programming interfaces (APIs) into its existing payments and commerce infrastructure. These APIs serve as software tools that enable companies to seamlessly integrate AI capabilities into their systems. The ultimate goal is to facilitate AI-assisted settlement, reconciliation, and invoicing processes, streamlining operations and enhancing efficiency.

This deal is a clear indicator of OpenAI's ambitious strategy to expand its presence in India, a market it identifies as one of its fastest-growing. OpenAI is actively working to evolve beyond its primary association as the creator of ChatGPT, seeking to embed its advanced AI technology across various sectors, including education, enterprise, and infrastructure. Reinforcing this commitment, OpenAI recently partnered with leading Indian engineering, medical, and design institutions to introduce AI tools into higher education. This initiative reflects a strong belief in India’s vast developer base and its more than a billion internet users as crucial drivers for the next phase of global AI adoption.

Pine Labs, a Noida-based company, has already been leveraging AI internally to automate parts of its settlement and reconciliation procedures. According to CEO B Amrish Rau, this internal AI adoption has dramatically cut the time required for daily settlements from several hours to mere minutes. Previously, the company relied on dozens of employees performing manual checks to process funds from multiple banks before markets opened. These workflows are now largely managed by AI-driven systems.

The partnership with OpenAI is designed to extend these proven AI-driven efficiencies beyond Pine Labs’ internal operations to its vast network of merchants and corporate clients. The initial focus is on business-to-business (B2B) use cases, such as invoice processing, settlements, and payments orchestration. Rau emphasized that B2B workflows are expected to see faster adoption of AI agents, as these agents are exceptionally well-suited to handle large volumes of repetitive financial tasks under predefined rules, paving the way for eventual integration into consumer-facing payments. He noted, “People talk about retail AI, but the bigger impact of all of this is really efficiency improvement, especially in B2B. 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.”

The rollout of more autonomous, agent-led payment workflows is anticipated to progress more rapidly in overseas markets where regulatory frameworks are more permissive of such transactions. In contrast, India is expected to witness a more gradual adoption, primarily centered on AI-assisted commerce rather than fully agent-initiated payments. Pine Labs is already prototyping agent-driven payments in parts of the Middle East and Southeast Asia, even as Indian regulations necessitate stricter controls on how payments are authorized.

For OpenAI, this collaboration provides a deeper entry point into India’s dynamic payments and enterprise ecosystem. It allows the company to move beyond consumer-facing tools and embed its sophisticated models into high-volume, regulated financial workflows. Rau explained that the partnership is also strategically aimed at increasing merchant stickiness for Pine Labs and expanding its role from a mere payments processor to a broader commerce platform. Over time, higher transaction volumes resulting from these enhanced services are expected to translate into incremental revenue.

Pine Labs boasts an impressive operational scale, working with over 980,000 merchants, 716 consumer brands, and 177 financial institutions. Its prospectus from the previous year indicated cumulative transactions exceeding 6 billion, valued at over ₹11.4 trillion (approximately $126 billion). The fintech firm operates across 20 countries, including Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, parts of Africa, the UAE, and the U.S., which provides the OpenAI partnership with significant reach across both Indian and international markets.

Regarding the financial structure of the partnership, Rau clarified that there is no revenue sharing between the two companies. Pine Labs will not take a cut if its merchants choose to embed OpenAI’s tools. He stated, “We’ve kept it completely independent of each other — anything related to payment and payment services, we will get the benefit of it, and anything related to OpenAI revenues will go to them.” Furthermore, the arrangement is non-exclusive, with Rau comparing it to OpenAI’s partnership with Stripe in the U.S. and affirming Pine Labs’ openness to collaborating with other AI providers.

Pine Labs is also prioritizing security and compliance, building additional layers around its AI-driven workflows to ensure the protection of sensitive merchant and consumer transaction data as AI is integrated more deeply into its payment systems. The focus remains on maintaining secure and compliant transactions even as automation increases.

Pine Labs’ interest in AI-driven commerce is not new, building on earlier work by its Setu unit, which had experimented with agent-led bill payment experiences using chatbots like ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. Concurrently, India itself initiated piloting consumer payments directly through AI chatbots last year. This new announcement coincides with India hosting its AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, an event showcasing the latest capabilities of global AI companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, alongside Indian startups demonstrating AI applications designed for large-scale deployment across critical sectors such as finance, healthcare, and education.