As India positions itself as a global hub for applied artificial intelligence, OpenAI has partnered with Pine Labs to integrate AI-driven reasoning into the fintech firm’s payments stack. This collaboration aims to automate settlement and invoicing workflows, a move the companies say could help accelerate AI-led commerce in India.
The partnership will see Pine Labs embed OpenAI’s application programming interfaces within its payments and commerce infrastructure. These software tools allow companies to plug AI into their existing systems. The goal is to enable AI-assisted settlement, reconciliation, and invoicing workflows.
This deal underscores OpenAI’s broader push to expand its footprint in India, one of its fastest-growing markets. The company is looking to move beyond being known primarily as the maker of ChatGPT and embed its technology into education, enterprise, and infrastructure. Earlier this week, OpenAI partnered with leading Indian engineering, medical, and design institutions to bring AI tools into higher education. The company is betting that India’s large developer base and more than a billion internet users will play a central role in the next phase of AI adoption.
Pine Labs is already using AI internally to automate parts of its settlement and reconciliation process. According to Chief Executive B Amrish Rau, this has cut the time it takes to clear daily settlements from hours to minutes. The Noida-based company previously relied on manual checks by dozens of employees to process funds from multiple banks before markets opened each day, a workflow that is now largely handled by AI-driven systems.
For Pine Labs, the partnership is intended to extend those AI-driven efficiencies beyond internal operations to merchants and corporate clients. This will start with business-to-business use cases such as invoice processing, settlements, and payments orchestration. Rau noted the company sees faster adoption in B2B workflows, where AI agents can handle large volumes of repetitive financial tasks under predefined rules, before similar capabilities reach consumer-facing payments.
Rau stated that people talk about retail AI, but the bigger impact is really efficiency improvement, especially in B2B. In workflows like invoicing and settlement, agents can actually drive the process end to end, and that is where adoption can happen faster.
The rollout of more autonomous, agent-led payment workflows will move faster in overseas markets where regulations already allow such transactions. Rau said India is likely to see a more gradual adoption focused on AI-assisted commerce rather than fully agent-initiated payments. He said that Pine Labs is already prototyping agent-driven payments in parts of the Middle East and Southeast Asia, even as Indian regulations require tighter controls on how payments are authorized.
For OpenAI, the partnership offers a route deeper into India’s payments and enterprise ecosystem as it looks to move beyond consumer-facing tools and embed its models into high-volume, regulated workflows. Rau said the collaboration is aimed at increasing merchant stickiness and expanding Pine Labs’ role from a payments processor to a broader commerce platform, with higher transaction volumes over time translating into incremental revenue.
Pine Labs says it works with more than 980,000 merchants, 716 consumer brands, and 177 financial institutions. It has processed over 6 billion cumulative transactions valued at over ₹11.4 trillion, per its prospectus published last year. The fintech operates across 20 countries, including Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, parts of Africa, the UAE, and the U.S., giving the OpenAI partnership reach across both Indian and international markets.
Rau said the partnership does not involve revenue sharing between the two companies, with Pine Labs not taking a cut if its merchants choose to embed OpenAI’s tools. He explained that they have kept it completely independent, with Pine Labs benefiting from payment services and OpenAI receiving its own related revenues.
The arrangement is also non-exclusive. Rau compared it to OpenAI’s partnership with Stripe in the U.S. and said Pine Labs remains open to working with other AI providers.
Rau said Pine Labs is building additional security and compliance layers around AI-driven workflows to ensure that sensitive merchant and consumer transaction data remains protected as the company integrates AI more deeply into its payments systems. The focus is on ensuring transactions remain secure and compliant even as more workflows are automated by AI.
Pine Labs’ interest in AI-driven commerce builds on earlier work through its Setu unit, which has experimented with agent-led bill payment experiences using chatbots including ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. Separately, India also began piloting consumer payments directly through AI chatbots last year.
The new announcement comes as India hosts its AI Impact Summit in New Delhi. There, global AI companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are showcasing their latest capabilities alongside Indian startups demonstrating AI applications aimed at large-scale deployment across sectors such as finance, healthcare, and education.