OpenAI Partners with Indian Payments Giant Pine Labs — Agentic Commerce Expands to India

OpenAI and Pine Labs Announce Partnership at AI Impact Summit 2026

OpenAI deepens India push with Pine Labs fintech partnership | TechCrunch

OpenAI moves beyond ChatGPT in India with a Pine Labs deal targeting enterprise payments and AI-driven commerce.

On February 18, 2026, OpenAI and Indian payments infrastructure leader Pine Labs announced a strategic partnership to automate payments and commerce using AI agents. The announcement was made at the India AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi.

Pine Labs will integrate OpenAI's API into its payments infrastructure to enable AI agent-driven payment reconciliation, invoice generation and verification, real-time exception resolution, and accelerated cash cycles. Moving beyond traditional rule-based automation (if/then logic) to "probabilistic reasoning," AI agents that evaluate context before taking action are set to transform merchant operations.

Industry Context

This partnership is a key move in OpenAI's India market strategy. At AI Impact Summit 2026, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stated that "India is currently leading the world in AI adoption and will become one of the largest markets."

OpenAI has been rapidly expanding partnerships in India. In October 2025, it launched a pilot for UPI payments through ChatGPT in collaboration with Razorpay and the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI). When a user tells ChatGPT to "order ingredients for Thai curry from BigBasket," the AI searches the catalog, suggests products, and completes the order through Razorpay's payment infrastructure. At AI Impact Summit, OpenAI also announced a major strategic partnership with the Tata Group and TCS.

The Pine Labs partnership differs from Razorpay's B2C (consumer-facing) approach by focusing on B2B (business-to-business) back-office operations. In India's digital economy, where over 1.8 trillion digital transactions are processed annually and the fintech industry has grown to approximately $1.5 trillion, back-end payment automation addresses a massive real-world demand.

Pine Labs' Payment Infrastructure and AI Integration Details

Pine Labs is one of India's leading payment platforms, with relationships spanning over 980,000 merchants, 716 consumer brands, and 177 financial institutions, having processed over 6 billion cumulative transactions totaling more than 11.4 trillion rupees (approximately $12.6 billion). In November 2025, backed by investments from PayPal and Mastercard, Pine Labs completed its IPO on the Mumbai Stock Exchange at a market capitalization of approximately $3.3 billion.

With this OpenAI partnership, Pine Labs will deploy AI agents across the following operational areas.

Payment reconciliation and settlement automation. AI agents will execute transaction matching across multiple banks. Pine Labs has already leveraged AI internally, reducing daily settlement processing from hours to minutes. The plan is to extend this efficiency to client enterprises.

Invoice generation, verification, and payment orchestration. AI agents will automatically generate invoices, verify their contents, and manage vendor payment processing end-to-end. Exception handling that was previously manual will be resolved in real time.

End-to-end commerce cycle management. The vision encompasses delegating the entire financial lifecycle to AI agents -- from product discovery and supplier negotiation to payment cycle optimization and recurring payment automation.

The partnership is structured as "non-exclusive" with "no revenue sharing." Pine Labs will not receive a portion of OpenAI's revenue; the arrangement is purely focused on enhancing services through API utilization.

Implications and Applications for E-Commerce Businesses

This partnership carries three key implications for e-commerce businesses.

The "execution layer" for agentic commerce is expanding in India. In the US, OpenAI has enabled direct purchases from ChatGPT through the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), partnering with Stripe, Shopify, and PayPal. In India, beyond B2C payments via Razorpay, OpenAI is now extending into B2B payment automation through Pine Labs. The world where "AI executes purchases and payments" is becoming a reality in Asian emerging markets as well.

Back-office automation is a high-impact, accessible entry point. While consumer-facing AI shopping still faces regulatory and UX hurdles, automating payment reconciliation and invoice processing is relatively straightforward to implement. India's regulatory environment emphasizes "AI-assisted workflows" over "fully autonomous" systems, requiring approaches that maintain human audit trails and authorization while advancing AI efficiency. For e-commerce businesses too, starting AI agent adoption from back-office operations is a practical choice.

AI readiness becomes a factor in payment platform selection. Pine Labs, Razorpay, and globally, Stripe and PayPal are all rapidly advancing AI agent capabilities. "Integration with AI agents" is emerging as a new evaluation criterion when choosing payment partners.

However, specific service launch timelines and the scope of eligible merchants have not yet been disclosed. A phased rollout is expected.

Summary

The OpenAI-Pine Labs partnership is a landmark move demonstrating that agentic commerce is expanding beyond "consumer shopping" into "back-end automation of B2B payments." Combined with consumer payments through Razorpay and enterprise collaboration with the Tata Group, Pine Labs' payment infrastructure integration gives OpenAI's India strategy three-layer coverage across consumers, enterprises, and infrastructure.

Key areas to watch include the specific service launch timeline for Pine Labs merchants, the direction of Indian regulatory guidelines on AI agent payments, and the competitive dynamics with Agent Pay that Mastercard announced at the same summit. India is rapidly gaining prominence as a "testing ground" for agentic commerce, and success patterns here could spread across Asia.