Pine Labs brings AI agents to merchants

Digital payments firm Pine Labs has announced a collaboration with Google Cloud to assist Indian merchants, particularly small and medium-sized businesses, in preparing for an AI-driven commerce future. This partnership aims to help merchants adapt their product catalogs, inventory, and payment systems to work seamlessly with AI agents that can discover products, compare options, and even complete purchases for consumers.

To achieve this, Pine Labs will employ Google Cloud's Gemini AI to develop tools across various areas, including marketing, merchant operations, and payments. Among these tools, Pine Labs is creating an AI ads agent that will generate and place advertisements across Google Search, YouTube, and its point-of-sale devices. This tool is designed to enable smaller businesses to reach customers without the burden of managing every aspect of their marketing efforts.

Another significant development from the partnership is the creation of a multi-agent platform called "Jarvis," built on Google Cloud's Gemini Enterprise. This platform will assist merchants in various tasks, such as program creation, system issue diagnosis, and customer support management on Pine Labs' Woohoo platform.

The partnership also extends to the payments sector. Pine Labs will integrate its P3P payment layer, enabling merchants to receive payments within AI-driven commerce flows, initially through UPI, with plans to expand to other payment methods later. To ensure the security and reliability of these transactions, Pine Labs is developing a governance layer called Grantex, which will make transactions auditable and compliant with Indian financial regulations.

Furthermore, the collaboration will support Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) and Agent-to-Agent (A2A) frameworks. These frameworks will allow AI agents and commerce systems to interact across different platforms, ensuring a seamless experience for consumers. According to Pine Labs CEO B. Amrish Rau, without the proper platform, agentic commerce risks repeating a pattern seen in the past, where new technologies initially favor large businesses while smaller enterprises lag behind.

The partnership between Pine Labs and Google Cloud aims to prevent smaller Indian businesses from being left out as shopping transitions from consumers browsing websites and apps to AI agents searching and making purchases on their behalf. Amit Kumar, managing director of Digital Natives Business at Google Cloud India, highlighted that this partnership will combine Pine Labs' commerce infrastructure with Google Cloud's AI and analytics capabilities to help merchants participate in the emerging agentic commerce landscape.