Pine Labs said on Thursday that it has partnered with Google Cloud to expand agentic commerce to merchants, including large enterprises and small and medium-sized businesses. The partnership marks a sharper focus on agentic commerce for the fintech company as AI agents increasingly search for products and complete purchases on users’ behalf.

According to a regulatory filing, Pine Labs will use Google Cloud’s Gemini AI to build tools across customer engagement, merchant payments, and operations.

1. Pine Labs is developing an AI ads agent for small businesses: The digital payments company is building an AI ads agent that can create and place ads across Google Search, YouTube, and Pine Labs’ Point-of-Sale (PoS)  machines. The agent is said to be aimed at helping small businesses expand their customer reach without having to manage marketing themselves.

With AI agents expected to become mainstream by 2030, merchants will need to adapt product catalogues, inventory, and payment systems for agents. That means making their product catalogues machine-readable, having real-time inventory, and enabling automated checkout.

“Without the right platform, agentic commerce repeats a pattern India has seen before: new technology reaches the top of the market first, and small businesses wait,” said Amrish Rau, CEO, Pine Labs.

2. Enter Jarvis, a multi-agent platform for merchants: Pine Labs Issuing is also building a multi-agent platform called “Jarvis”, built on Gemini Enterprise. The company said Jarvis will enable merchants to create programs, run system diagnostics and manage customer support across its gift card distribution platform, Woohoo.

Besides selling PoS devices, Pine Labs also operates an Issuing business, under which it offers prepaid cards, gift cards, loyalty programs and several other stored value programs for the likes of Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra, Croma and hundreds of enterprise clients through its brand Qwikcilver.

Entrackr reported in June that Qwikcilver accounted for Rs 800 crore or 30% of Pine Labs’ total operating revenue of Rs 2,711 crore in FY26.

During the Q1 FY27 earnings call, the management disclosed that Pine Labs was planning to launch meal cards, fuel cards and expense cards in October in a bid to expand its issuing business.

Recently, the company has started distributing gift cards through Blinkit and Zepto, signalling that quick commerce platforms are emerging as a key sales channel for digital gifting.

3. What merchant pain points does Pine Labs say its AI agents aim to address?

(i)Discoverability and scalability: If a merchant’s product catalogue is not AI-readable, an agent cannot recommend them to the consumer. Pine Labs says discoverability is only the first step. The company plans to offer Indian merchants a full customer acquisition stack, built on Google Cloud’s AI and data infrastructure.

(ii) Receiving payment: Pine Labs says its agentic payments protocol P3P will allow merchants to receive payments within AI-driven commerce flows, starting with UPI and later expanding to other payment rails.

Launched in June this year, P3P is currently live on UPI ReservePay. Pine Labs plans to expand the system to other payment rails including cards, net banking, wallets and Equated Monthly Instalment (EMI) options in the coming days.

Its developer documentation separately lists stablecoins, cryptocurrencies pegged to stable assets such as the US dollar, as a future payment rail.

(iii) Governance: The company is also building a governance infrastructure called “Grantex” to make transactions auditable and compliant with the country’s financial regulations.

Pine Labs said its platform will support Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) and Agent-to-Agent (A2A) frameworks, allowing AI agents and commerce systems to interact across platforms.

“The shift to AI-driven buying is already underway. The question is whether India’s 60 million small businesses get to be part of it from the start, or wait for infrastructure that was built for someone else first,” Rau added.

4. Why this matters: A recent Mastercard report titled “A Short History of the Future of Shopping and Payments” suggested that more than 1 in 10 online shoppers will routinely use AI agents to purchase products on their behalf by 2030. This includes AI-assisted agents that can negotiate prices, smartwatches and rings that show how products are performing after purchase, and even physical AI agents walking into brick-and-mortar stores.

As commerce increasingly shifts to AI agents, merchants will need to ensure that their product catalogues, inventory and payment systems can work with these AI tools.

Early examples of agentic commerce are already happening. At the Global Fintech Fest earlier this month, Amazon Pay introduced Smart Wallet, a new offering that lets AI agents make UPI payments on behalf of users. While agentic UPI payments are currently live for flight ticket booking, the company aims to extend the capability to additional merchants and use cases over time.

In March, Razorpay and Sarvam AI announced they had built a voice-first system where an AI agent understands commands in Indian languages and can complete food orders and payments on a user’s behalf without a PIN at checkout. The authentication happens upfront, the spending limit is capped at Rs 10,000, and if the agent orders the wrong thing, the merchant bears the liability.

The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) is also said to be working on a Unified Agent Protocol that will allow AI agents to make UPI payments.

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