Now, AI agents can decide when to strike deals using UPI mandate

MUMBAI: Pine Labs has launched India’s first agent-to-agent payment capability, enabling autonomous transactions through artificial intelligence by extending UPI’s standing mandate framework to machines.

The company on Thursday introduced the Pine Labs Payment Protocol (P3P), allowing users to authorise a onetime mandate that can be delegated to an AI agent, which can then independently decide when to execute a payment based on predefined conditions and negotiations with a counter-party agent. The move removes the need for human authentication at the point of transaction, a longstanding limitation in digital payments.

The launch was demonstrated in partnership with Gullak, a digital gold savings platform, where users can instruct an AI agent to purchase gold automatically when prices fall to a specified level. Once the mandate is approved, the agent monitors price movements and completes the transaction without requiring further user intervention. A deployment is also underway with Vijay Sales, where customers can set target prices for electronic goods and deploy AI agents to strike a deal when their target price is achieved, turning price discovery and purchase into a continuous, machine-driven process.

P3P builds on UPI’s existing mandate architecture, including one-time mandates and block-and-debit frameworks, to enable what Pine Labs describes as “agentic commerce”, where software agents can browse, negotiate and pay on behalf of users. The system incorporates controls such as spending limits, identity verification and audit trails.
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