Pine Labs and Google Cloud target agentic commerce for Indian SMBs
Pine Labs has announced a strategic collaboration with Google Cloud to build agentic commerce infrastructure for Indian merchants, with a particular focus on extending access to small and medium-sized businesses. The partnership centres on deploying Google's Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform across Pine Labs' payments, issuing, and marketing stack.
The announcement comes at a moment when AI agents are beginning to reshape how consumers discover and purchase products. Rather than navigating websites or apps directly, shoppers increasingly rely on AI systems to research options and complete transactions on their behalf. Pine Labs and Google Cloud argue that without deliberate intervention, this shift risks replicating a familiar pattern: new infrastructure benefits large enterprises first, while smaller merchants wait years for equivalent tools.
What the platform covers
The collaboration targets three specific barriers the companies say prevent Indian SMBs from participating in agentic commerce. The first is discoverability: if an AI agent cannot read a merchant's product catalogue, that merchant is effectively invisible to AI-driven buyers. Pine Labs says it will offer catalogue enrichment tools built on Gemini, alongside AI-powered campaign management and digital presence capabilities.
The second barrier is payments. Pine Labs' P3P layer is positioned as the settlement infrastructure for real-time, compliant transactions within agentic flows, initially running on UPI with planned expansion across additional payment rails. The third is governance: a product called Grantex is designed to ensure every transaction flowing through the platform remains auditable and meets India's financial regulatory requirements, an important consideration given the Reserve Bank of India's close oversight of digital payments infrastructure.
On the issuing side, Pine Labs is building a multi-agent platform called Jarvis on Gemini Enterprise, intended to assist merchants with programme creation, diagnostics and customer support across its Woohoo gift and loyalty platform. The company also said it will offer native integration for the Universal Commerce Protocol and the Agent-to-Agent framework, two emerging interoperability standards intended to enable cross-platform agentic transactions.
"We're talking about the same rails, the same AI agents and the same access to credit, one commerce operating layer for every merchant," said B. Amrish Rau, chief executive of Pine Labs.
Market and competitive context
India's digital payments market is one of the most competitive in the world. Pine Labs sits alongside rivals including Razorpay, PayU, and Juspay in the merchant-facing payments layer, while its issuing and affordability solutions put it in proximity to fintech infrastructure players operating across Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Google Cloud's involvement provides access to Gemini model tooling, but Pine Labs will still need to demonstrate that its agentic products perform reliably at scale before enterprise customers commit to the platform.
The broader agentic commerce category is nascent globally. Hyperscalers including AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google are each investing heavily in agent frameworks, while a number of specialist startups are building vertical commerce agents. For Pine Labs, the partnership represents an opportunity to position itself as the preferred merchant-side infrastructure layer in India before that market consolidates. Whether it can convert India's SMB base, estimated at 60 million businesses, into active users of AI-driven tooling will depend as much on pricing and onboarding friction as on the underlying technology.
The regulatory dimension is also significant. Agentic payment flows that operate without explicit consumer interaction at each step will require close coordination with the RBI and with UPI's governing body, the National Payments Corporation of India, as guidelines around autonomous transaction authorisation are still being developed.