Cashfree opens checkout to AI agents, leaves final say with shoppers

Financial services and payments technology firm Cashfree on Friday launched Checkout for Agents, which uses WebMCP to let artificial intelligence (AI) agents read order details and available payment methods without having to interpret a webpage’s layout and underlying code.

The company claims the checkout mechanism will make it easier for AI shopping assistants or agents to get past the payment page on websites built for people. However, the new checkout feature keeps customers in control of the final payment.

It also said the feature covers all merchants using Cashfree’s hosted checkout and requires no changes to their existing integration. Agent-led shopping remains a small part of Cashfree’s business, with co-founder Reeju Datta saying that AI agents account for less than 1% of checkout sessions across its merchants.


“Agentic traffic on our checkout is still at a nascent stage as the adoption of AI agents is still very early in India,” Datta told ET AI, acknowledging agents struggle with the payment process.

He added: “This is largely because without the WebMCP, the agent has to crawl the website, read the HTML code, figure out what each button means, make the decision and then execute the task, which is a very inefficient process and takes time.”

The execution process

Cashfree’s approach gives agents a defined set of actions they can take at each stage of checkout, like reading the amount payable or choosing a payment method. The company said this could reduce token consumption by more than 40%, potentially lowering the computing costs of completing a purchase, although it did not provide details of the testing for this estimate.

But the feature stops short of authorising a transaction; customers would review the final order and authenticate payment. Datta said for the time being, humans would retain responsibility for authentication.

“With WebMCP, our aim was to help agents make the checkout process more seamless and efficient. This is the first stage of our agentic payments roadmap. At this point, humans continue to stay in loop for reviewing the final order and authenticating the payment,” he told ET AI.

Keeping a tab on the info

Such a division also shapes and controls the information an agent can access. Cashfree limits what its checkout shares as the most sensitive payment steps are still with the customer.

“What an agent stores is governed by the company that builds the agent. Our approach is to limit what the checkout shares with the agent in the first place,” Datta said.

He said agents could see the order amount, items and available payment methods and that the company masks personally identifiable information before sharing it.

He further noted: “A UPI payment, for example, is authorised with the customer’s PIN inside their own UPI app. We don’t allow the agent to enter customer card details via WebMCP.”