Pine Labs ties up with Google Cloud to build AI shopping agents

What happens to a kirana store when the customer is an AI agent? Pine Labs thinks it has part of the answer. The Noida-based payments company has announced a collaboration with Google Cloud to build what it calls agentic commerce infrastructure for Indian merchants, from large enterprises down to small businesses.

Pine Labs disclosed the partnership to the stock exchanges on Thursday. It will use Google Cloud's Gemini models to build tools across customer engagement, merchant payments and operations.

The pieces Pine Labs is building

The first is an AI ads agent for small businesses. According to the company, it will create and place ads across Google Search, YouTube and Pine Labs' own point-of-sale terminals, so that a shop owner can reach new customers without running campaigns personally.

The second is Jarvis, a multi-agent platform built on Gemini Enterprise by Pine Labs' Issuing business. It is meant to let merchants set up programmes, run system diagnostics and manage customer support on Woohoo, the company's gift card distribution platform.

Payments are the third layer. Pine Labs' agentic payments protocol, P3P, is designed to let merchants receive money inside AI-driven buying flows. It is currently live on UPI ReservePay, and the company plans to extend it to cards, net banking, wallets and EMI options. Pine Labs' developer documentation also lists stablecoins as a possible future rail, though nothing in the announcement commits to that.

Finally, the company is building a governance layer called Grantex, intended to make agent-led transactions auditable and compliant with Indian financial regulations. Pine Labs says its platform will support the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) and Agent-to-Agent (A2A) frameworks so that different AI agents and commerce systems can talk to each other.

The small-business pitch

CEO Amrish Rau framed the deal around who gets left behind. "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," he said.

He added that the shift to AI-driven buying was already under way, and the question was whether India's 60 million small businesses would be part of it from the start.

The company's argument runs like this. If a merchant's catalogue is not machine-readable, an AI shopping agent cannot recommend it. So merchants need structured catalogues, real-time inventory and automated checkout. Pine Labs wants to sell that full stack, built on Google Cloud's AI and data infrastructure.

What is still missing

The announcement is heavy on architecture and light on dates and money. Pine Labs has not said when the ads agent or Jarvis will be commercially available, how they will be priced, or what share of revenue flows to Google. The financial terms of the collaboration were not disclosed.

There is also the regulatory question. Payments started by software agents on a user's behalf raise questions about consent, authentication and liability. Grantex is Pine Labs' attempt to address them, but the final word will rest with regulators.

For Pine Labs, which listed on the exchanges and has been widening its issuing and gift card business, the deal places it early in a space where global card networks and big tech firms are also racing. For merchants, the practical test will be whether any of this shows up at the counter in the next year.