As India positions itself as a global center for applied artificial intelligence, OpenAI has entered a partnership with Pine Labs to incorporate AI-driven reasoning into the fintech company's payments systems. This collaboration aims to automate settlement and invoicing workflows, a step both firms believe will help speed up AI-powered commerce across India.

Under the agreement announced on Thursday, Pine Labs will integrate OpenAI's application programming interfaces—software tools that allow businesses to incorporate AI into their existing platforms—into its payments and commerce infrastructure. The goal is to enable AI-assisted processes for settlement, reconciliation, and invoicing.

This deal highlights OpenAI's wider effort to grow its presence in India, one of its fastest-expanding markets. The company is seeking to move beyond its identity as the creator of ChatGPT and embed its technology into education, enterprise, and infrastructure sectors. Earlier this week, OpenAI collaborated with top Indian institutions in engineering, medicine, and design to introduce AI tools into higher education, banking on India's vast developer community and over a billion internet users to drive the next wave 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 reduced the time required for daily settlements from hours to just minutes. Previously, the Noida-based company depended on manual checks by dozens of employees to process funds from various banks before markets opened each day—a workflow now largely managed by AI-driven systems.

Rau noted that the company anticipates quicker adoption in business-to-business workflows, where AI agents can manage high volumes of repetitive financial tasks under set rules, before similar capabilities extend to consumer-facing payments. "People talk about retail AI, but the bigger impact of all of this is really efficiency improvement, especially in B2B," Rau said. "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."

He added that the rollout of more autonomous, agent-led payment workflows will progress faster in overseas markets where regulations already permit such transactions. In India, adoption is expected to be more gradual, focusing on AI-assisted commerce rather than fully agent-initiated payments. Pine Labs is already prototyping agent-driven payments in certain regions of the Middle East and Southeast Asia, even as Indian regulations require stricter controls over payment authorization.

For OpenAI, this partnership provides a pathway into India's payments and enterprise ecosystem as it shifts focus from consumer tools to embedding its models into high-volume, regulated workflows. Rau stated that the collaboration is designed to increase merchant loyalty and expand Pine Labs' role from a payments processor to a broader commerce platform, with growing transaction volumes expected to generate incremental revenue over time.

According to its prospectus published last year, Pine Labs works with more than 980,000 merchants, 716 consumer brands, and 177 financial institutions. The company has processed over 6 billion cumulative transactions valued at more than ₹11.4 trillion (approximately $126 billion). Operating in 20 countries—including Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, parts of Africa, the UAE, and the U.S.—the partnership with OpenAI extends its reach across both Indian and international markets.

Rau clarified that the partnership does not involve revenue sharing between the two companies; Pine Labs will not take a cut if its merchants choose to use OpenAI's tools. "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," he explained. He also described the arrangement as non-exclusive, comparing it to OpenAI's partnership with Stripe in the U.S. and noting that Pine Labs remains open to collaborating with other AI providers.

To ensure the security of sensitive merchant and consumer transaction data as AI is integrated more deeply into its payments systems, Pine Labs is building additional security and compliance layers around AI-driven workflows. Rau emphasized that the focus remains on maintaining secure and compliant transactions even as more processes become automated.

Pine Labs' interest in AI-driven commerce builds on earlier initiatives through its Setu unit, which has experimented with agent-led bill payment experiences using chatbots like ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. Separately, India began piloting consumer payments directly through AI chatbots last year.

This new announcement coincides with India hosting its AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, where global AI companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are showcasing their latest advancements alongside Indian startups demonstrating AI applications for large-scale use in sectors like finance, healthcare, and education.