Pine Labs and Google Cloud have announced a strategic partnership to build AI agent commerce infrastructure specifically designed for Indian small and medium-sized businesses, aiming to prevent a repeat of history where new technology benefits large enterprises first while smaller merchants wait years for equivalent access. The collaboration deploys Google's Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform across Pine Labs' payments, issuing, and marketing stack, targeting what the companies describe as three critical barriers preventing Indian SMBs from participating in the emerging agentic commerce economy.

Why Are AI Agents Reshaping How People Shop?

The way consumers discover and purchase products is fundamentally changing. Rather than navigating websites or apps directly, shoppers increasingly rely on AI systems to research options and complete transactions on their behalf. This shift toward AI-driven purchasing represents a significant departure from traditional e-commerce, but it creates a new problem: if an AI agent cannot read a merchant's product catalogue, that merchant becomes invisible to AI-powered buyers.

For India's estimated 60 million small businesses, this technological transition poses an existential risk. Without deliberate intervention, the companies argue, agentic commerce will replicate a familiar pattern where large enterprises gain early access to new infrastructure while smaller merchants are left behind. Pine Labs and Google Cloud are positioning their partnership as a way to democratize access to these tools from the outset.

What Are the Three Main Barriers Pine Labs Is Addressing?

Pine Labs has identified three specific obstacles preventing Indian SMBs from participating in agentic commerce. The partnership directly targets each one with dedicated solutions designed to integrate seamlessly into the merchant experience.

• Discoverability: Pine Labs will offer catalogue enrichment tools built on Gemini, alongside AI-powered campaign management and digital presence capabilities, ensuring that merchant products can be read and recommended by AI agents.
• Payments Infrastructure: Pine Labs' P3P layer is positioned as the settlement infrastructure for real-time, compliant transactions within agentic flows, initially running on UPI (Unified Payments Interface) with planned expansion across additional payment rails.
• Regulatory 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 will also 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.

B. Amrish Rau, Chief Executive Officer at Pine Labs

How to Prepare Your Business for Agentic Commerce

For merchants looking to participate in this emerging ecosystem, several practical steps can help ensure readiness as AI agent commerce becomes mainstream.

• Optimize Your Product Data: Ensure your product catalogues are complete, accurate, and machine-readable so that AI agents can discover and recommend your offerings to potential customers.
• Understand Payment Compliance: Familiarize yourself with how autonomous transaction authorization works and ensure your business can operate within emerging regulatory guidelines from the Reserve Bank of India and the National Payments Corporation of India.
• Leverage Multi-Agent Platforms: Explore tools like Jarvis that can help with programme creation, customer diagnostics, and support automation, reducing the operational burden of managing loyalty and gift programmes.
• Adopt Interoperability Standards: Participate in emerging standards like the Universal Commerce Protocol and Agent-to-Agent framework to ensure your business can transact across multiple agentic platforms.

What Challenges Remain for This Partnership?

While the partnership addresses significant infrastructure gaps, substantial challenges remain before agentic commerce becomes mainstream in India. Pine Labs will 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, with hyperscalers including AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google each investing heavily in agent frameworks, while specialist startups are building vertical commerce agents.

Converting India's SMB base 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.

For Pine Labs, the partnership represents an opportunity to position itself as the preferred merchant-side infrastructure layer in India before the agentic commerce market consolidates. The company 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 execution at scale will ultimately determine whether this partnership reshapes commerce for India's smallest merchants.