OpenAI has partnered with Pine Labs, one of India’s largest merchant payment processors, to integrate its advanced reasoning models into the fintech company’s payments and commerce infrastructure.

Announced Thursday, the collaboration aims to automate settlement, reconciliation, invoicing, and payments orchestration workflows—starting with business-to-business use cases—while positioning India as a key testing ground for AI-led commerce in regulated environments.

According to TechCrunch, the partnership leverages OpenAI’s APIs to embed reasoning and agentic capabilities directly into Pine Labs’ stack.

Pine Labs CEO B. Amrish Rau told TechCrunch the integration builds on existing internal AI use, where the company has already reduced daily settlement clearance times from hours to minutes by automating manual checks across multiple banks.

“The bigger impact of all of this is really efficiency improvement, especially in B2B,” Rau said. “If you look at invoicing and settlement, those are workflows where agents can actually drive the process end to end, and that’s where adoption can happen faster.”

Focus on B2B and Regulated Workflows

The rollout prioritizes enterprise-grade automation in high-volume, repetitive financial tasks. Initial use cases include:

• Invoice processing and reconciliation
• Settlement orchestration across banks
• Compliance and fraud monitoring
• Payments routing and exception handling

Rau emphasized that full agent-initiated payments will likely advance faster in overseas markets (the Middle East, Southeast Asia) where regulations permit more autonomous transaction flows. In India, adoption will remain “AI-assisted” due to stricter payment authorization rules, with human oversight required for final execution.

Pine Labs is already prototyping agent-driven payments in select international markets. The partnership is non-exclusive and involves no revenue sharing. Rau compared it to OpenAI’s U.S. collaboration with Stripe, noting Pine Labs remains open to working with other AI providers (including Anthropic’s Claude, which it has used in earlier bill-payment experiments via its Setu unit).

Security, Compliance, and Data Protection Emphasis

Pine Labs is layering additional security and compliance controls around AI workflows to protect sensitive merchant and consumer transaction data. Rau stressed that all integrations prioritize data privacy, auditability, and regulatory adherence—critical in India’s tightly regulated payments ecosystem under RBI guidelines.

The deal aligns with OpenAI’s aggressive India expansion strategy. Earlier this week, OpenAI partnered with leading Indian engineering, medical, and design institutions to integrate AI tools into higher education, tapping India’s massive developer base and 1 billion+ internet users. India is now one of OpenAI’s fastest-growing markets, with significant enterprise traction among banks, insurers, retailers, and government entities.

For Pine Labs, the collaboration extends its role from a payments processor to a broader commerce platform. The company works with over 980,000 merchants, 716 consumer brands, and 177 financial institutions across 20 countries, having processed more than 6 billion transactions valued at over ?11.4 trillion (~$126 billion) as per its 2025 prospectus.

Embedding AI agents aims to increase merchant stickiness, transaction volumes, and incremental revenue streams.

The partnership highlights the accelerating shift toward agentic AI in enterprise fintech:

• Automating multi-step, rule-based workflows (settlements, invoicing, reconciliation)
• Reducing manual intervention in high-volume financial operations
• Improving speed, accuracy, and cost efficiency in regulated environments

It also reflects India’s growing role as a global AI deployment and innovation hub. With massive developer talent, favorable regulatory sandboxes (e.g., RBI’s Payments Vision 2025), and government initiatives like IndiaAI Mission, India is emerging as a preferred market for testing enterprise-grade AI agents in payments and commerce.

Competitors are moving in parallel:

• PhonePe, Paytm, and Razorpay have launched AI-driven fraud detection, customer support chatbots, and reconciliation tools.
• Global players like Stripe (with OpenAI) and Adyen are rolling out AI-powered payments intelligence.
• Domestic banks (HDFC, ICICI, Axis) are deploying internal AI agents for compliance and operations.

The collaboration arrives as India hosts the AI Impact Summit (February 16–20, 2026), where OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and others are showcasing capabilities alongside Indian startups focused on large-scale deployment in finance, healthcare, and education.

Rau sees B2B workflows as the fastest path to adoption, with consumer-facing agentic payments likely to follow more gradually due to regulatory caution. The partnership’s success will depend much on execution: delivering measurable ROI (cost savings, faster reconciliation, reduced errors), maintaining compliance in regulated sectors, and scaling agent reliability across diverse merchant use cases.

The deal deepens OpenAI’s footprint in India’s payments ecosystem—one of the world’s largest and fastest-digitizing markets—while providing real-world validation of Claude’s reasoning capabilities in high-stakes financial operations. For Pine Labs, it strengthens its competitive positioning against both domestic fintechs and global payments giants.

Partnerships like OpenAI–Pine Labs illustrate how frontier models are being embedded into mission-critical enterprise workflows—starting with B2B efficiency gains and potentially expanding to autonomous commerce in the years ahead.

The way virtual experiences land on us is different: they’re pre-packaged. They’re brighter, louder, quicker to start, and simpler to re-run. Real life, on the other hand, makes you wait. It includes the time spent traveling, the awkward silences, the poor sound quality, and the messy, unscripted friction of other people. In 2026, the surprise is not that screens are everywhere; it is that many digital moments feel more persuasive than the physical ones they imitate.

This influence does not require science fiction. It grows from familiar human wiring: attention loves novelty, memory prefers clean narratives, and emotion follows what feels immediate. Virtual experiences can be designed to press those buttons reliably, while real experiences often refuse to cooperate. The result is a subtle shift in authority. What happens on a screen can feel like the main event, and what happens offline becomes the supporting act.

Vividness beats truth

The mind is built to respond to what seems present, not to what is objectively important. A short video clip can provoke a stronger response than a long, detailed explanation because it’s experienced as immediate proof. This is the core strength of immersive media: it eliminates distance, pulls background details into sharp focus, and makes the person watching feel like they are there.

VR, in particular, is powerful because it creates a strong sense of immediacy, and that feeling of immediacy often drives our emotions and decisions more strongly than what we might call “objective reality.” When a system produces a strong sense of “being there,” people can respond realistically even when they know the environment is simulated. That gap between knowledge and reaction is not a moral failure; it is a feature of perception. Virtual experiences win influence when they create the feeling of proximity that real life cannot always deliver on demand.

Algorithms edit reality

Digital life is not a neutral window. Feeds prioritise what keeps attention, and attention shapes what becomes memorable. A small number of repeated themes can feel like a broad social consensus because the same ideas keep resurfacing.

This is where virtual influence becomes cultural influence. People don’t merely consume content; they inherit a sense of what matters, who is admired, and what counts as normal. In physical communities, variety is forced by geography and chance encounters. Online, variety must be chosen deliberately, because the system is built to remove the need to search.

Control is intoxicating

Virtual experiences offer a kind of control that everyday life rarely grants. You can pause, rewind, fast-forward, mute, leave instantly, and return without apology. Even social interaction becomes adjustable: typed messages can be revised, calls can be ignored, and presence can be simulated with reaction buttons.

Control changes emotional cost. A difficult moment in real life has consequences that linger, while an uncomfortable moment online can be erased with a swipe. That makes virtual spaces attractive not only for entertainment but for identity rehearsal. The person you are online can be polished, consistent, and protected from the randomness that tests you offline.

The match as a live narrative engine

Sport is where virtual influence becomes easiest to see, because a match now has two audiences at once: the crowd watching the pitch and the crowd watching the data. Live odds, lineup alerts, and short-form highlights create a parallel storyline that can feel more urgent than the actual game.

A tournament night is full of micro-moments that the eye can miss: a full-back collecting a second warning, a striker losing duels, a coach preparing a substitution. Fans who browse all betting programs (Arabic: ???? ????? ?????????) often discover that markets price those details immediately, and the speed itself becomes part of the entertainment. Pre-match prices shift as lineups are confirmed, and in-play lines can move after one spell of sustained pressure. A disciplined habit keeps it readable: choose markets that match what you can observe, then treat every new line as a question, not a command. When the second screen runs this smoothly, the virtual layer doesn’t accompany the match; it competes with it.

Avatars and handles

The digital self is not just a profile picture. It is a performance that can reshape mood and decision-making. People behave differently when they feel watched, when they feel anonymous, or when they adopt a stylised version of themselves.

Research on the “Proteus effect” suggests that the characteristics of an avatar can influence the user’s behaviour, even without explicit social feedback. The point is not that everyone becomes a different person online; it is that identity is more flexible than it feels. Virtual spaces provide endless cues that nudge behaviour in small steps. Over time, those nudges can feel like personality.

Convenience turns influence into identity

Virtual experiences become dominant when they are not merely engaging but effortless. Once daily life depends on the same device for messaging, payments, travel, sport, and entertainment, the boundary between “online time” and “real time” becomes blurred. ITU figures show that about 74% of the world’s population is online in 2025, which means most systems now assume connectivity as the default condition.

This matters because habit is the strongest form of persuasion. A person may not consciously prefer virtual moments, yet still spend more time in them because access is immediate and the rewards are frequent. Matchdays reveal the pattern clearly: the same thumb that checks a message checks a lineup, checks a highlight, then checks a price.

The easiest doorway is the common one

The most influential platforms are not always the most innovative. They are the ones that reduce friction: fewer steps, faster load times, and interfaces built for quick decisions. Virtual influence grows when participation feels natural, not technical.

That’s why a phrase like download MelBet (Arabic: ????? melbet) shows up in everyday search behaviour around big sporting moments. A fan wants a straightforward route to follow odds, track live markets, and keep the match in view without juggling multiple apps. Convenience becomes a kind of trust, because repetition makes the interface feel familiar even when the event is unpredictable. In that loop, the virtual layer tightens its grip: the screen becomes the place where the match is understood, not merely watched.

Real life can still win, but it has to be chosen

Virtual experiences influence us more than real ones because they are engineered to be vivid, controllable, and constant. They deliver emotion without travel, community without geography, and identity without the same level of risk. Real life remains richer, but it is slower, messier, and harder to curate.

The practical response is not nostalgia; it is strategy. Treat digital experiences as designed environments that shape behaviour, then set boundaries that protect attention. When the screen stops being the default and becomes a deliberate choice, the physical world regains its weight.

Three Vietnamese airlines signed major aircraft purchase and financing agreements with Boeing on Thursday, totaling more than $30 billion in commitments, as Vietnam and the United States continue negotiations toward a new bilateral trade deal.

The deals were announced during a visit to the United States by General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam To Lam, who attended the inaugural meeting of the Board of Peace, a Trump administration initiative aimed at addressing global conflicts.

Key Agreements Announced

• Vietnam Airlines signed an $8.1 billion deal for 50 Boeing 737-8 narrow-body jets, with deliveries scheduled between 2030 and 2032. This order will increase the flag carrier’s fleet to approximately 151 aircraft by 2030. The airline is also in ongoing talks with Boeing for an additional 30 wide-body aircraft (likely 787 Dreamliners), valued at up to $12 billion.
• Sun PhuQuoc Airways, Vietnam’s newly established carrier focused on tourism routes, signed a $22.5 billion agreement for 40 Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner jets.
• Vietjet, the country’s leading budget airline, secured a $965 million financing deal with Griffin Global Asset Management for six Boeing 737-8 aircraft.

The total potential value of the commitments exceeds $30 billion, with additional wide-body discussions potentially pushing the figure higher. The agreements were signed in the presence of U.S. and Vietnamese officials and reflect Vietnam’s rapid aviation sector growth and Hanoi’s strategic effort to deepen economic ties with the United States.

The deals are part of Vietnam’s broader push to diversify trade and investment partners amid ongoing trade negotiations with the U.S. In early February 2026, Vietnam signaled its willingness to purchase more American goods after the White House announced it would maintain tariffs on most Vietnamese imports at 20% while removing duties on select products. The aircraft orders serve as a high-profile demonstration of Vietnam’s commitment to balancing its trade relationship with Washington.

Vietnam’s aviation market is one of the fastest-growing in Asia, driven by rising middle-class travel, tourism recovery, and expanding international routes. The country’s carriers have placed some of the largest aircraft orders in the region in recent years, reflecting strong demand despite global supply chain constraints and high fuel prices.

Boeing’s Commercial Aviation Recovery Gains Momentum

The Vietnamese orders provide a significant boost to Boeing, which has shown signs of recovery under CEO Kelly Ortberg after years of crisis. Boeing delivered 46 aircraft in January 2026 and booked 103 net orders—outpacing Airbus (19 deliveries and 49 net orders) for the month. While Airbus maintained a larger overall delivery lead in 2025 (193 more aircraft), Boeing reclaimed the lead in net orders for the first time since 2018.

Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury acknowledged ongoing challenges, particularly engine shortages from Pratt & Whitney, affecting the 2026 delivery outlook. Airbus now expects to deliver around 870 commercial aircraft in 2026—slightly below the analyst consensus of ~880—due to “unsatisfactory” engine supply. Shares of Airbus fell 6.2% on the news, pushing the stock into negative territory for 2026.

Boeing’s recovery is supported by improved production stability, resolution of 737 MAX certification issues, and renewed confidence from major customers. Ortberg has emphasized near-term production ramp-up and cost discipline following $19.5 billion in EV-related write-downs and a strategic refocus on core aviation strengths.

Vietnam’s Increasing Role in the Aviation Market

Vietnam’s carriers are capitalizing on one of the world’s fastest-growing aviation markets. Pre-COVID passenger traffic growth averaged 15–20% annually, and recovery has been strong since 2023. The country is projected to become one of the top 10 fastest-growing aviation markets globally through 2035, according to Boeing’s Commercial Market Outlook.

The deals also highlight Boeing’s continued strength in the narrow-body (737) and wide-body (787) segments, despite competition from Airbus’s A320neo and A350 families. The 737-8 remains the best-selling narrow-body aircraft globally, while the 787 Dreamliner has carved out a strong position in long-haul, medium-capacity routes—key for Vietnam’s expanding international network.

The Geopolitics Driving the Deals

The aircraft orders coincide with ongoing U.S.-Vietnam trade negotiations and reflect Hanoi’s desire to strengthen economic ties with Washington amid complex regional dynamics, including South China Sea tensions and supply-chain diversification away from China. Vietnam has positioned itself as a key beneficiary of “China+1” manufacturing shifts, attracting significant foreign direct investment from U.S., Japanese, and Korean firms.

The timing of the deals—during To Lam’s visit and the Board of Peace inaugural meeting—underscores the linkage between economic cooperation and broader diplomatic engagement. The U.S. has sought to deepen ties with Vietnam as a strategic counterweight in Southeast Asia, and large-scale commercial agreements like these help build momentum.

The orders provide a timely boost to Boeing’s commercial backlog at a moment when Airbus faces engine supply constraints and quality challenges. The deals also reinforce Boeing’s position in one of the world’s fastest-growing aviation markets, where narrow-body and wide-body demand is expected to remain robust for the next decade.