Pine Labs, the Indian digital payment gateway company, announced that it is collaborating with the Sam Altman-led OpenAI on Thursday. The company will embed OpenAI’s APIs into its digital payments infrastructure to enable agentic commerce in the country. The new collaboration was announced on the sidelines of India’s AI Impact Summit 2026, which was kicked off by the government on February 16, and is scheduled to conclude on February 21. This is set to be OpenAI’s second collaboration with a digital payments company after the AI giant entered into a partnership with Razorpay.
Pine Labs to Embed OpenAI’s APIs Into Its AI-Native Infrastructure
On Thursday, the Indian digital payment gateway company Pine Labs announced that it is collaborating with OpenAI, the US-based AI giant, to embed its APIs into the core of its global merchant ecosystem. The company said that this will help Pine Labs move “beyond traditional automation” and build Agentic Commerce for merchants in the country. Apart from recording digital transactions, Pine Labs’ financial system will also autonomously optimise workflows with OpenAI’s help.
This, the company said, marks a technological leap, shifting from deterministic or “if/then” logical processing to a probabilistic reasoning layer. This will be enabled with the integration of OpenAI’s APIs into Pine Labs’ payments gateway infrastructure, which will allow its systems to understand context and weigh probabilities, keeping its operations “within a secure, compliant framework”. The partnership is also said to facilitate conversational AI’s shift from a medium of discovery to creating a mandate for action.
Moreover, Pine Labs said that users will be able to delegate “financial lifecycles” to AI-powered agents, along with searching for products. The AI agent will autonomously negotiate supplier terms, optimise settlement cycles, and manage recurring bill payments for merchants.
To highlight the scale of the digital payments ecosystem in India, Pine Labs said that India recorded more than 18,000 crore digital transactions annually, and Pine Labs expected the country’s fintech sector to achieve a $1.5 trillion (about Rs. 1,37,00,000 crore) valuation this year.
This comes soon after OpenAI announced that it is partnering with Razorpay and the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) to allow users to buy groceries and other products on ChatGPT. It is claimed to allow customers to place orders with a single click across platforms like BigBasket, via Razorpay’s payment stack.
