As India pitches 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, automating settlement and invoicing workflows in 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 — software tools that let companies plug AI into their existing systems — within its payments and commerce infrastructure, the companies said on Thursday, all with the aim of enabling AI-assisted settlement, reconciliation, and invoicing workflows.
The deal underscores OpenAI’s broader push to expand its footprint in India, one of its fastest-growing markets, as it looks 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, 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, cutting the time it takes to clear daily settlements from hours to minutes, according to Chief executive B Amrish Rau. 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, he said in an interview.
For Pine Labs, the partnership is intended to extend those AI-driven efficiencies beyond internal operations to merchants and corporate clients, starting with business-to-business use cases such as invoice processing, settlements and payments orchestration, Rau told TechCrunch. He 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.
“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.”
The rollout of more autonomous, agent-led payment workflows will move faster in overseas markets where regulations already allow such transactions, Rau said, while 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.
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