What is Razorpay RAY?

RAY is an AI account manager from Razorpay that runs inside WhatsApp, launched in partnership with IndusInd Bank with Bajaj Finance among the first businesses live on it. You can ask it in a normal message or voice note for yesterday's payments, a sales projection, a payment link or a refund, and it can act on the request instead of just explaining it. Razorpay says businesses have already had more than 20,000 conversations with it.

Should a small business stop paying for a website because AI agents can handle customer questions?

No, and the reason is simple. Agents answer with whatever information they can find about you, so if your hours, prices, services and location are not written down anywhere in plain text, the agent guesses or says nothing. A website is still the cheapest place to publish that information in a form both Google and an AI agent can read.

Will an AI agent like RAY replace my staff?

It replaces the part of the day spent opening dashboards, checking settlement status and typing follow-ups. It does not replace the person who decides what to charge, which jobs to take, or how to handle an upset customer. Treat it as a faster answer to "where is my money" rather than as an employee.

Does my website need to change because of AI agents?

Only in a few specific ways: keep your service details and prices visible as text rather than inside images, keep one clear page per service, make sure your enquiry form actually delivers to an inbox you read, and add a WhatsApp link since that is where most Indian customers will continue the conversation.

Is WhatsApp enough on its own for a small business in India?

WhatsApp is where the conversation happens, but it is a weak discovery channel on its own. Customers still search first, so your Google Business Profile, your website text and your reviews are what bring the message in. WhatsApp then closes the deal.

Razorpay Put an AI Account Manager on WhatsApp. What Should Your Website Still Do?

Razorpay's RAY answers payment questions and takes real actions inside WhatsApp. Here is what that changes for an Indian small business website, and what it does not.

Short answer first: Razorpay has put an AI account manager called RAY inside WhatsApp, and it does more than reply politely. Ask it for yesterday's payments, a two-month sales projection, a payment link or a refund, and it acts on the request inside the same chat. For a small business the interesting part is not the AI. It is that the place where you already do your talking is now also the place where money questions get answered and money actions happen.

I build websites and small automations for businesses around Chennai and I have watched owners here adopt software differently from their counterparts in the US. They do not want another dashboard. They want to send a message and get an answer. So when a payments company says you can now type "show me yesterday's payments" instead of logging in, that lands differently in India than it would in San Francisco.

What RAY actually does

Razorpay launched RAY as an AI Account Manager on WhatsApp in partnership with IndusInd Bank, with Bajaj Finance among the first businesses live on it. You can message it in text or as a voice note. Razorpay's own example of a proactive alert is the sort of thing every owner understands: a message pointing out that a settlement is due Wednesday, that Tuesday is a bank holiday, and asking whether to settle it today instead. Razorpay says businesses have already had more than 20,000 conversations with it since launch.

What matters is not that it answers questions. An FAQ page could do that. What matters is that RAY operates inside Razorpay's systems, so it can issue a refund, generate a payment link or check a settlement status instead of telling you to go and do it yourself somewhere else.

This is not a Razorpay-only trend. HoneyBook announced in September that it is available as a plugin inside ChatGPT, part of OpenAI's Small Business Collection, which OpenAI says now includes 16 tools such as Stripe, Canva, Gusto, Slack, Dropbox, ClickUp and Wix. Perplexity now runs agents for QuickBooks and Mailchimp, and eMarketer reported that Intuit has done similar tie-ups with ChatGPT and Claude for invoicing, payroll and lending. The pattern across all of them is the same: the software you already pay for is getting an assistant that sits in front of it, and that assistant lives in a chat window, not in your browser tabs.

A client of mine runs a two-person service business in Chennai. His enquiries arrive on WhatsApp at ten in the evening and get handled at seven the next morning. Nothing about RAY or ChatGPT fixes that. What fixed it was a short reply template and a rule that whoever sees the message first answers it, and that took about an hour to set up. I keep coming back to that gap between what the launch posts promise and what a small team can actually operate.

So does this change how much a small business should spend on a website?

It changes what the website is for. It does not remove the need for one.

Here is the test I use with clients. If an AI agent had to tell a customer what you do, where you work, what you roughly charge and how to book you, could it find those answers without a human? If the answers live only inside your head, inside an Instagram bio, or inside a price list saved as a JPEG, the agent will either stay silent or invent something close enough to be expensive.

The businesses getting value from these agents are the ones whose boring information was already tidy. HoneyBook said that the most common thing businesses did with its ChatGPT connection in the first two weeks was reconcile records: finding completed work that had not been invoiced, leads that had gone quiet, and unpaid invoices. That work is only possible because somebody's data was in one place with names and dates on it. Agents reward bookkeeping, not ambition.

The two jobs your website still has

Being readable by a machine

Google and AI assistants read text, not posters. So the practical work looks like this:

Your services written as sentences with the words customers actually type, not just keyword headings.
One page per service that matters to your revenue, because a single "Services" page that lists eleven things helps nobody rank for anything.
A price range or a "starts from" figure. It filters out people who were never going to buy, and yes, it is uncomfortable the first time.
LocalBusiness or Service structured data that states your area, hours and phone number in a format machines understand.
Your Google Business Profile and your website saying the same phone number and the same hours. When they disagree, both lose.

Being trusted by a human

The rest is not technical. When someone lands on your site from a search at 9pm, they are deciding in about eight seconds whether you are a real business. Real photographs of your shop, staff, or finished work. The name of the person who will reply. A visible response time. Your landline or mobile as a click-to-call link, not an image of a number.

And a working WhatsApp link. Not a "contact us" form that nobody monitors. A click-to-chat link with a pre-filled message like "Hi, I saw your site, I need a quote for X" removes two steps and, in my experience, is the single highest-return change on a small business site in India.

Which brings back the obvious question

If RAY handles payments and ChatGPT handles the paperwork, is the website just decoration now?

The opposite, actually. Your website is the only asset you control that a human reads and a machine reads at the same time, without an intermediary deciding what to show them. A WhatsApp catalogue disappears when the number changes. An Instagram grid is not searchable for "interior designer in Adyar". The website is where you state your terms once and both audiences can access them for years.

What I would avoid is the reflex that follows every AI announcement, which is buying another tool. The subscription audit I wrote about last week is worth repeating here: the changes that pay for themselves are the ones that fix what customers already touch, not the ones that add a new login.

What I would do this month

Open your site on a phone and message yourself through the contact form. Check the spam folder. A silent form is worse than no form, because it looks like you ignored someone.
Add a WhatsApp click-to-chat link in your header and your footer, with a pre-filled first message.
Rewrite your homepage's first two lines so they name your service, your city and who you serve. No slogan.
Split your services page if it lists more than five unrelated things.
Write down your starting prices, or at least a range, somewhere on the site.
Add LocalBusiness schema with your real hours and phone number.
Turn on approval requirements before letting any AI tool message customers on your behalf. Razorpay's own commentary around these launches keeps coming back to trust and opt-in limits, and that instinct is correct. A refund sent by mistake is a real loss and an awkward phone call.

None of that is exciting. All of it is cheaper than the lead you lost last week because nobody answered.

What I am not convinced about yet

Two things, and I would rather say them than sell you a bundle.

The first is autonomy over money. An agent that issues refunds or sends payment links from a chat message is convenient right up to the day it reads your instruction wrong, and then you are explaining a shortfall to your accountant. The launch material from these companies keeps landing on the same safeguard: approvals on the phone before an autonomous action goes through, and limits on what the agent may spend or move. Turn those on, and keep your bank and payment app notifications on your own phone, not only on a staff member's.

The second is fit. If you get five enquiries a month, you do not need an AI account manager or a chat agent. You need your number in the right places and a habit of replying. Agents start earning their keep somewhere around the point where the admin follows you home every night. Before that they are another subscription.

Where I think this lands

AI agents on top of payments and billing will quietly remove a lot of dashboard time from small businesses in India this year, and that is a good thing, because the dashboard was never the work. What the agents cannot do is decide that you exist. That still happens the old way: somebody searches, finds a page that looks like a real business, and sends a message.

If you want help getting the readable and trustable parts right, I build these sites for a living and the fixes are usually smaller than owners expect. Have a look at what I do, recent work, or get in touch if your site is due for a cleanup.