OpenAI partners with Pine Labs to automate payments in India

On Thursday, OpenAI announced a partnership with Pine Labs to integrate AI-driven reasoning into the fintech firm’s payments stack—the infrastructure used to process financial transactions. The collaboration aims to automate settlement (the transfer of funds between parties), reconciliation (ensuring records match), and invoicing (the issuing of bills) workflows. According to the companies, the partnership could help accelerate AI-led commerce in India. The move represents a shift for OpenAI as it seeks to embed its technology directly into enterprise infrastructure, moving beyond consumer-facing applications like ChatGPT.

According to Pine Labs chief executive B Amrish Rau, the partnership is intended to extend AI-driven efficiencies beyond internal operations to merchants and corporate clients. The initial focus will be on business-to-business (B2B) transactions, where AI agents can handle repetitive financial tasks under predefined rules. “People talk about retail AI, but the bigger impact of all of this is really efficiency improvement, especially in B2B,” Rau said. Pine Labs has already experimented with agent-led bill payment experiences through Setu, its unit that previously tested chatbot integrations with providers like Anthropic.

The partnership is non-exclusive, drawing comparisons to OpenAI’s partnership model with Stripe, and does not involve revenue sharing between the two companies. Rau noted that Pine Labs will benefit from payment services while OpenAI retains its own revenues, keeping the two operations completely independent of each other. The agreement gives OpenAI access to a massive merchant network. Pine Labs operates across 20 countries, including Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, parts of Africa, the UAE, the U.S., and the Middle East. According to its prospectus, the fintech 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, which is about $126 billion.

Why it matters

This deal signals OpenAI’s strategic pivot from consumer-facing tools to embedding its models into high-volume, regulated enterprise infrastructure, specifically targeting India as a critical growth market.