Cashfree’s Relay brings AI agents to SMB payment operations

By Puja Sharma

• Relay completes payment operations tasks end to end, including cart recovery, failed payment retries, COD confirmation, subscription management, dispute filing and more
• An average SMB spends 60 hours per week on payment operations; Relay aims to reduce this drastically to less than 45 minutes
• Relay agents are pre-trained on Cashfree’s payments data for high success rates, cost-efficiency, and also has turnkey agents that can start working right away
• Merchants set it up by describing the outcome in plain language or by voice; no generic AI configuration is required

Cashfree Payments, an AI-native payments platform, has launched Relay, an AI Super-Agent that automates and runs payment operations for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and startups.

Commenting on the launch, Reeju Datta, Co-founder, Cashfree Payments, said, “Relay is a natural extension of our vision to empower SMBs to scale efficiently. For early-stage SMBs with lean teams, managing payment follow-ups and operations can consume a significant portion of the day, including the founder’s time. Until now, the only way to get it done was to put a person on it, and a five-person team does not have a person to spare. Relay acts as an intelligent team member, seamlessly taking over and automating these critical workflows through turnkey agents. Ultimately, this gives founders the time and space to do more and focus on growth.”

According to Cashfree’s data, 7 in 10 Indian SMBs handle payment operations entirely manually, with most of the remainder using tools that cover only a single channel or workflow. Relay understands the business and executes payment operations tasks rather than surfacing them for a merchant to complete. It retries failed payments, follows up on abandoned carts, confirms cash-on-delivery orders before dispatch, manages failed subscriptions and files disputes ahead of deadlines. It reads the merchant’s transaction records and completes each action directly. An average SMB spends 60 hours per week on payment operations, Relay aims to reduce this drastically to less than 45 minutes, enabling SMBs to focus on business growth.

Merchants configure Relay by describing the outcome they want, through prompt or speech. Relay either builds a custom agent or runs an existing agent within minutes, to achieve the outcome. It requires merchant approval at two points, before money moves and before a customer is contacted. All actions remain visible to the merchant.

Relay runs entirely on Cashfree’s infrastructure. Merchant transaction data is not sent to external AI providers.

Ramkumar Venkatesan, Chief Technology Officer, Cashfree Payments, said, “Automating business processes with AI offers the highest ROI for SMBs. However, most lack access to tools to fully automate payment operations, relying on manual work or fragmented point solutions like AI callers and automated messaging. These tools lack deep context and intelligence. Relay solves this by providing SMBs with turnkey agents that deliver immediate impact, along with the flexibility to build custom agents simply by specifying desired outcomes.”