Pine Labs partners with OpenAI to embed AI into its merchant stack
The partnership aims to drive 'agentic commerce' by embedding AI-driven reasoning into high-volume financial workflows.
Merchant payments company Pine Labs is integrating OpenAI's artificial intelligence models directly into its core systems to autonomously optimise the workflows behind transactions.
The architecture would allow AI agents to autonomously navigate complex financial tasks such as negotiating supplier terms, optimising cross-border settlement cycles, and managing recurring bill payments within predefined user guardrails, the companies said in a statement.
OpenAI will provide decision-making capabilities, while Pine Lab's payment rails will handle transaction execution and regulatory compliance, the statement said.
Pine Labs also plans to make this agentic stack available to third-party developers, enabling them to build AI-native fintech applications on its infrastructure.
“For decades, commerce has been built on passive systems that simply follow instructions. At Pine Labs, we are moving beyond that era to build an active, intelligent layer for business," said B Amrish Rau, CEO of Pine Labs, in the statement.
He also said, "Our work with OpenAI ensures that our infrastructure is no longer just a participant in a trade, but a driver of efficiency and growth. We are building the first agentic stack for the next generation of the global economy.”
Pine Labs said the integration will create a "reasoning layer” for commerce, enabling systems to interpret context and weigh probabilities while operating within a secure and compliant framework with data isolation, encryption, and human oversight where required.
“The next phase of AI is about moving from information to action,” said Oliver Jay, Managing Director, International at OpenAI.
“By combining our advanced reasoning capabilities with Pine Labs’ deep merchant infrastructure, we are helping to create a powerful engine for innovation that turns complex financial workflows into seamless, agentic experiences at scale," he added.
Pine Labs’ collaboration with OpenAI was announced alongside a launch by Cashfree Payments at the India AI Impact Summit 2026, underscoring how Indian fintech firms are embedding payments directly into AI interfaces.
Cashfree Payments has introduced what it calls India’s first payments extension for AI applications. Branded 'Cashfree Here', it is designed to embed checkout capabilities inside conversational interfaces such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude.
The Bengaluru-based company said the extension enables businesses to accept UPI and card payments within chat interfaces, eliminating the need to redirect users to external payment pages. The system acts as a native payments layer for AI applications built on OpenAI’s Apps SDK and Anthropic’s MCP framework.
Edited by Swetha Kannan