Google Cloud Takes Agentic AI Push to Indian Merchants, Farms and Earbuds With Pine Labs, Cropin and boAt

Google Cloud used its first 'Let's Talk AI' media showcase in Bengaluru on September 24 to make a pointed argument: artificial intelligence in India is moving past chatbots that answer questions and into agents that actually execute work. As reported by Dataquest India, the company put three homegrown partners on stage — payments firm Pine Labs, agritech company Cropin and audio brand boAt — to show what that shift looks like across commerce, agriculture and consumer hardware.

The Bengaluru session, the first stop on a planned media tour, was led by Amit Kumar, Managing Director for Google Cloud India's digital natives business, alongside Tarun Pant, Director of Customer Engineering, Naren Kachroo, Head of AI Sales, and Jyothi Prakash, Head of Security, according to Dataquest's coverage of the event. Executives cited a set of global numbers to frame the pitch: the Gemini app now counts about 950 million monthly users, Google Cloud's revenue grew 82 per cent in the second quarter of 2026, the division's order backlog stands at $513.9 billion, and 90 per cent of Fortune 100 companies use Gemini Enterprise, per the figures shared at the event. The company also pointed to its previously announced plan to invest $15 billion in India between 2026 and 2030.

Pine Labs: AI agents for six crore small merchants

The most consequential of the three partnerships for India's economy may be the one with Pine Labs, the Noida-based merchant payments company. Announced on September 24, the collaboration will put Gemini-powered agents to work on merchant operations, customer engagement and payments, with the stated ambition of helping India's roughly six crore micro, small and medium businesses participate in AI-led commerce, according to coverage in YourStory and Business News This Week.

Two products anchor the effort. An AI advertising agent will help merchants create and run campaigns across Google Search, YouTube and Pine Labs' own point-of-sale devices. Separately, Jarvis, a multi-agent system built on Gemini Enterprise, is designed to handle merchant operations and customer support. Business News This Week reported that the companies are also building AI-led tools for merchant services, risk management, reconciliation and financial workflows — the unglamorous back-office tasks where small merchants typically have no technology support at all.

Because the agents touch payments, both companies emphasised guardrails. The collaboration includes security and regulatory safeguards for payment processing, controls around customer data and transaction authorisation, and transparency requirements for how the agents operate, per Business News This Week.

Cropin: an agentic platform spanning 400 crops

Cropin's contribution to the showcase was OrbitAI, the agentic platform for food and agriculture it launched with Google Cloud in July 2026 and which the Bengaluru-based company describes as the world's first of its kind. Prakhyath Hegde, Cropin's Chief Technology and Product Officer, represented the company at the Bengaluru event, per Dataquest.

OrbitAI is built on Google Cloud infrastructure using Gemini models, the Agent Development Kit, BigQuery and the WeatherNext forecasting system, and is trained on proprietary agricultural datasets Cropin has collected over 15 years — covering operations in 103 countries, more than 400 crops and over 10,000 crop varieties across more than a billion acres of farmland, according to the company's announcement carried by Agro Spectrum India. The platform deploys specialised agents that deliver region-specific recommendations in natural language to users ranging from commodity traders and sourcing managers to smallholder farmers. Notably, Cropin says the platform is model-agnostic: it can run on Gemini but also on Anthropic's Claude, OpenAI's GPT models or open-source alternatives, and is available as a Model Context Protocol server so its intelligence can plug into other companies' AI workflows.

boAt: Gemini in your ears

The consumer face of the push is boAt, which on September 21 launched Crest AI, an AI platform built with Google Gemini that the company is positioning as 'Intelligent Ears'. “We are bringing that intelligence to your ears. Our idea of 'Intelligent Ears' is simple: earbuds that can listen, understand, converse and assist,” boAt CEO Gaurav Nayyar said in the launch announcement, as reported by CXO Digital Pulse.

Crest AI ships with three capabilities: Crest Ask for natural conversations with the assistant, G-Assist, which connects to Gmail, Google Tasks and Calendar so users can summarise their day or reply to emails by voice, and Crest Translate, which offers real-time two-way translation across more than 25 languages. The flagship device, the Airdopes Prime 800 D, pairs the AI features with Dolby Audio, 11mm drivers, four microphones and up to 45 hours of playback; the platform also extends to the Airdopes Prime 701 ANC and Nirvana Ion ANC. At the Bengaluru event, boAt's Chief Product Officer Shyam Vedantam struck a note of restraint, telling reporters that “technology for the sake of technology does not necessarily add any value,” per Dataquest.

Why it matters

Taken together, the three partnerships sketch Google Cloud's India strategy in miniature: pair Gemini with sector-specific data, devices and payment rails owned by local companies, rather than selling AI as a standalone product. For Pine Labs it is a route to millions of merchants; for Cropin, a way to turn 15 years of farm data into autonomous advice; for boAt, a bid to differentiate in a brutally competitive audio market. Whether Indian merchants, farmers and listeners actually want agents acting on their behalf — and whether the safeguards hold when payments are involved — is the question the next year will answer.

Sources: This article draws on reporting from Dataquest India, Business News This Week, CXO Digital Pulse and Agro Spectrum India.