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Pine Labs Taps Google Cloud to Bring Agentic Commerce to Indian Merchants

Posted on 26th Sep 2026 06:14:55 in Business, Digital Marketing

Tagged as: Pine Labs, Google Cloud, Agentic Commerce, Small Business AI, Digital Payments

Pine Labs will work with Google Cloud to build "agentic commerce" infrastructure for Indian merchants, the digital payments company said in a regulatory filing on September 24 — a bet that a growing share of shopping will soon be done not by people browsing websites, but by AI agents that find products, compare options and pay on a shopper's behalf.

The partnership will use Google Cloud's Gemini AI models and the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform across product discovery, advertising, merchant payments and customer engagement. The companies said the initial focus is small and medium businesses — the merchants who usually get new commerce technology last.

What Pine Labs and Google Cloud Are Building

The collaboration targets three bottlenecks that currently keep small merchants out of AI-driven shopping: discoverability, payments and governance.

  • Discoverability. An AI agent cannot recommend a merchant whose catalogue it cannot read. Pine Labs will use Google Cloud's AI and data infrastructure, including the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, for catalogue enrichment, search and the deployment of commerce-focused agents — all aimed at making product data machine-readable.
  • Payments. Pine Labs' agentic payments protocol, P3P, is designed to settle transactions that begin inside an AI conversation, starting with UPI and expanding to other rails over time. P3P launched in June this year, is live on UPI ReservePay, and has been used with partners including Vijay Sales and Gullak, according to Inc42.
  • Governance. Agents that spend money need an audit trail. Pine Labs is building a governance layer called Grantex to keep agent-initiated transactions auditable and compliant with India's financial regulations.

Two more pieces sit alongside those pillars. An AI advertising agent will create and place ads for small businesses across Google Search, YouTube and Pine Labs' point-of-sale devices. And the company's issuing arm is building "Jarvis", a multi-agent platform on Gemini Enterprise to handle programme creation, system diagnostics and customer support for its Woohoo gift-card platform.

The platform will also offer native support for the emerging Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) and Agent-to-Agent (A2A) frameworks, so that agents and commerce systems can interact across different platforms.

A Marketing Team in a Box for Small Businesses

The AI advertising agent is the part of the announcement that will matter most to shop owners. Most small Indian businesses have never run a digital ad campaign. They do not know which keywords to bid on, what a good click-through rate looks like, or how to set a daily budget. Because of that, their reach is often limited to whoever walks past the shop, gets a recommendation in a WhatsApp group, or searches their exact name.

The agent Pine Labs is building is designed to close that gap. It will not just suggest ads — it will create and place them across Google Search, YouTube and Pine Labs' point-of-sale devices, letting a small business expand its customer reach "without having to manage marketing themselves", as the company put it. For a shop owner, that is a meaningful shift: from a tool you have to learn, to an assistant that runs the campaign for you.

The catch, as with all marketing automation, is the raw material. An ad agent can only sell what a business can describe. Clear product photos, accurate prices, honest descriptions and a working offers-and-returns policy will decide whether the ads it generates are worth their placement.

Why This Is Happening Now: Shoppers Are Letting AI Agents Buy

Agentic commerce is moving quickly from concept to checkout. As Moneycontrol noted in its coverage of the announcement, AI agents can already discover products, compare options and complete purchases without a consumer ever visiting a website or app. The merchants that benefit from that shift, the report said, tend to be those with structured, AI-readable catalogues, live inventory and automated checkout.

The market data points the same way. A Mastercard report, "A Short History of the Future of Shopping and Payments", estimates that more than one in ten online shoppers will routinely use AI agents to buy on their behalf by 2030. In India, the early pieces are already live. Amazon Pay introduced a Smart Wallet at the Global Fintech Fest this month that lets AI agents make UPI payments, initially for flight bookings. Razorpay and Sarvam AI built a voice-first agent in March that completes food orders and payments in Indian languages, with a Rs 10,000 spending cap and liability sitting with the merchant if the agent orders incorrectly. And NPCI is reported to be working on a Unified Agent Protocol that will let AI agents make UPI payments.

Against that backdrop, the point of the Pine Labs–Google Cloud tie-up is infrastructure — the unglamorous plumbing of catalogues, payments and audit trails that has to exist before an agent can buy from a neighbourhood store as easily as it books a flight.

What Indian Small Businesses Should Do Now

Nobody can say exactly when agent-initiated orders will become a routine part of small-business sales in India. But the groundwork is cheap to lay now, and most of it also helps with ordinary human customers today.

  • Make your catalogue machine-readable. Keep complete, consistent product information — names, prices, sizes, stock status — on your website, your Google Business Profile and the marketplaces you sell on. Agents read the same structured signals that search engines use.
  • Keep stock counts live. An agent that gets burned by an out-of-stock item stops recommending the seller. Sync inventory across channels wherever possible.
  • Be broadly payable. UPI QR codes at the counter and online payment links are the rails agent payments will start on. Make sure both work smoothly.
  • Build the trust signals agents check. Reviews, ratings, verified profiles, clear return and refund policies — these are what AI shoppers rely on to decide between two similar merchants.
  • Get your marketing raw material ready. Decent product photos, complete specifications and a standing set of offers will be what an AI advertising agent needs when tools like Pine Labs' go live.
  • Keep records clean. Governance layers like Grantex are appearing precisely because agent transactions must be auditable. Proper invoicing and record-keeping will matter more, not less, in agentic commerce.

The Road Ahead

Partnership announcements like this one take time to reach the shop floor, and the companies have not put a timeline on when these products will be broadly available to small merchants. But the strategic intent is unusually explicit. "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 B. Amrish Rau, CEO of Pine Labs. "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."

Amit Kumar, who leads Google Cloud India's Digital Natives Business, said the collaboration pairs Pine Labs' commerce infrastructure with Google Cloud's AI and analytics capabilities so that merchants can be "discoverable, trusted, and fully active participants in agentic commerce".

For India's small sellers, the practical takeaway is simple: the era in which AI agents do the shopping is close enough to prepare for, and the businesses that start treating their catalogue, inventory and payments data as infrastructure today will be the ones an agent can actually find — and pay.

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