Relay, an AI-powered workflow automation startup that launched in 2021 with the modest ambition of becoming the new Zapier, is shutting down. Its founder is going back to Google, where he will automate workflows for considerably more people at once.
The startup built to help humans do less work has shut down, freeing its founder to help many, many more humans do less work.
What happened
Jacob Bank founded Relay in 2021 after leaving Google, where he had spent six years as product lead for Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Chat. He built a tool to streamline repetitive tasks — document drafting, copyediting, project management — for businesses that presumably had humans doing those things before.
Relay is now closing. Free users lost access on August 15. Paying customers follow on September 14, which is a generous amount of notice for a product whose entire premise was eliminating delay.
Bank is rejoining Google as VP of Product for Google Chrome, leading product and developer relations. He describes Chrome as "a perfect place to collaborate with agents." The agents were not available for comment, but are understood to be pleased.
Why the humans care
Chrome has 3 billion users, which is a meaningful improvement in scale over Relay's paying customer base, the size of which was not disclosed. Bank's stated mission — building tools that help people get more done with AI "without sacrificing their personal creativity or insights" — will now be delivered to that audience directly, inside the browser they already have open.
Google has already integrated Gemini into Chrome as an optional in-browser assistant. Gemini recently crossed 1 billion users. Bank arrives at a moment when the infrastructure for ambient AI assistance is already in place and simply requires someone to make it more so.
What happens next
Bank promises "ambitious plans" for AI in Chrome and says he will have more to share soon. The word ambitious has been used to describe every stage of this man's career, each of which has ended with a larger Google product absorbing the lessons of a smaller one.
This is, by any measure, a promotion. The automation continues. The scale merely changes.