Cashfree Launches AI Agent Platform to Automate Payments for SMBs

Cashfree claims Relay can reduce manual work from an average of 60 hours a week to under 45 minutes.

Cashfree Payments has launched Relay, an AI-powered agent platform designed to automate end-to-end payment operations for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and startups.

The Bengaluru-based fintech said Relay can handle tasks including recovering abandoned carts, retrying failed payments, confirming cash-on-delivery orders, managing failed subscriptions, and filing payment disputes. The product has been in beta with merchants since May 2026 and is now available to all Cashfree merchants.

Cashfree said seven in 10 Indian SMBs currently manage payment operations entirely through manual processes, while most of the remainder rely on tools limited to individual channels or workflows. According to the company, the average SMB spends about 60 hours a week on payment operations, while Relay is designed to cut that to less than 45 minutes.

Unlike tools that simply flag tasks for merchants to complete, Relay executes payment workflows itself, according to the company. It can read transaction records and take actions such as retrying failed payments, following up on abandoned carts, confirming COD orders before dispatch, managing subscription failures and filing disputes before deadlines.

Merchants can configure Relay by describing the desired outcome using text prompts or voice. The platform can either create a custom agent or deploy an existing turnkey agent within minutes, without requiring conventional AI configuration. Cashfree said merchants retain control through approval checkpoints before money is moved or customers are contacted, while all actions remain visible to them.

“Relay is a natural extension of our vision to empower SMBs to scale efficiently,” Reeju Datta, Co-founder of Cashfree Payments, said in a statement. He added that payment follow-ups and operational tasks can consume a significant amount of time for lean teams, with Relay designed to function as an “intelligent team member” handling these workflows.

The agents are pre-trained on Cashfree’s payments data, which the company said is intended to improve task success rates and cost efficiency. Relay also includes pre-built agents that merchants can deploy immediately.

The platform runs entirely on Cashfree’s infrastructure, with merchant transaction data not sent to external AI providers.

“Automating business processes with AI offers the highest ROI for SMBs,” said Ramkumar Venkatesan, CTO at Cashfree Payments. He said existing solutions such as AI callers and automated messaging often address individual workflows without the deeper context required to automate payment operations end to end.

Relay is free for Cashfree merchants at launch. The company plans to introduce outcome-based pricing as adoption increases.