OpenAI is making its most aggressive play yet for India's enterprise market, partnering with fintech giant Pine Labs to embed AI into the country's digital payments and commerce infrastructure. The deal marks a strategic shift from OpenAI's consumer-focused ChatGPT presence in India toward capturing enterprise revenue in one of the world's fastest-growing digital economies. With Pine Labs processing billions in merchant transactions across Asia, the partnership could give OpenAI unprecedented access to India's booming payments ecosystem.
OpenAI just handed itself the keys to India's digital payments engine. The Sam Altman-led AI giant announced a partnership with Pine Labs, one of Asia's largest merchant commerce platforms, to bring AI-powered tools directly into the transactions flowing through India's $1 trillion digital payments market.
The move represents OpenAI's most significant bet on India's enterprise sector to date. While ChatGPT has gained millions of users across the subcontinent, this partnership targets the infrastructure layer where actual money changes hands - point-of-sale systems, online checkout flows, and merchant analytics platforms that Pine Labs operates across 500,000 merchant locations.
"We're not just adding a chatbot to receipts," a person familiar with the partnership told TechCrunch. The integration aims to embed OpenAI's language models into fraud detection systems, personalized checkout experiences, and merchant business intelligence tools - the unglamorous but lucrative backend of digital commerce.
For Pine Labs, which counts Mastercard, Temasek, and PayPal among its backers and reportedly shelved IPO plans last year, the OpenAI partnership offers a technological refresh at a critical moment. The company's last disclosed valuation hit $5 billion in 2022, but it's been racing to differentiate itself as competition intensifies from Paytm, PhonePe, and Google Pay in India's crowded fintech landscape.
