Cashfree Payments has launched Relay, an AI agent designed to handle payment operations for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and startups. The system automates tasks like cart recovery, failed payment retries, COD confirmation, subscription management, and dispute filing, with the company reporting that an average SMB spends 60 hours per week on these operations. Cashfree says Relay can cut that to under 45 minutes.
Relay works by reading a merchant's transaction records and completing actions directly, rather than surfacing tasks for a human to finish. Merchants set it up by describing the outcome they want, either through text or voice, and the system either builds a custom agent or runs an existing one within minutes. The agents are pre-trained on Cashfree's payments data, and the company says they require merchant approval at two points: before money moves and before a customer is contacted.
According to Cashfree's data, 7 in 10 Indian SMBs handle payment operations entirely manually, and most of the rest use tools that only cover a single channel or workflow. The company positions Relay as a way for lean teams to offload work that would otherwise require hiring a dedicated person.
How Relay is built
Relay runs entirely on Cashfree's infrastructure, and merchant transaction data is not sent to external AI providers. The company says the agents come as "turnkey" options that can start working immediately, or merchants can build custom agents by specifying desired outcomes in plain language.
Reeju Datta, Co-founder of Cashfree Payments, said in a statement: "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."
Ramkumar Venkatesan, Chief Technology Officer at Cashfree Payments, said most SMBs "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."
The launch reflects a broader shift in how AI is being applied to business workflows. For operations teams, this kind of tool points to a pattern worth watching: AI systems that don't just suggest actions but execute them within defined guardrails. That distinction matters for AI for Operations professionals evaluating which tasks can be safely delegated to automated agents.
What changes for payment operations
Relay retries failed payments, follows up on abandoned carts, confirms cash-on-delivery orders before dispatch, manages failed subscriptions, and files disputes ahead of deadlines. All actions remain visible to the merchant, and the system requires approval at the two critical checkpoints mentioned earlier.
Cashfree describes Relay as an "AI Super-Agent," and says it is a natural extension of the company's focus on helping SMBs scale without adding headcount. The company is an AI-native payments platform, meaning its core infrastructure was built with AI as a foundational layer rather than as an add-on.
Why this matters for operations professionals
For operations managers, the practical takeaway is about workflow design. Relay automates a specific set of payment tasks end to end, but it still requires human approval at financial and customer-facing decision points. That split - automating execution while keeping humans in control of judgment calls - is the model most operations teams will need to plan around as AI agents become more common. The company's claim of cutting 60 hours of weekly work to under 45 minutes is a specific target worth testing against your own workflows, and the AI Learning Path for Operations Managers offers a structured way to evaluate which processes in your organization are ready for similar treatment.
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