Zoho has made a significant leap in artificial intelligence by launching a suite of AI-driven capabilities. This includes the introduction of Zia LLM, a proprietary large language model, along with Automatic Speech Recognition models in English and Hindi, a no-code agent builder called Zia Agent Studio, and a model context protocol (MCP) server. These were announced at Zoholics India, the company's annual user conference in Bengaluru, marking a pivotal moment in Zoho's AI journey.
Zia LLM is designed specifically for business use cases, built entirely in-house using NVIDIA's AI accelerated computing platform. It comprises three models with 1.3 billion, 2.6 billion, and 7 billion parameters, each optimized for contextual applicability. This approach, known as "right sizing," ensures that the models are both powerful and efficient in terms of resource utilization.
"Today's announcement emphasizes Zoho's longstanding aim to build foundational technology focused on the protection of customer data, breadth and depth of capabilities because of the business context, and value," said Mani Vembu, CEO of Zoho.
The Zia LLM models are currently being tested internally across Zoho's app portfolio and are expected to be available for customer use soon. This aligns with Zoho's commitment to data privacy, allowing customers to keep their data on Zoho servers while leveraging the latest AI capabilities without sending data to external AI cloud providers.
AI agents and speech recognition
In addition to Zia LLM, Zoho has introduced two proprietary Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models for speech-to-text conversion in English and Hindi. These models are optimized to perform on a low computer load without compromising accuracy, benchmarking up to 75% better than comparable models across standard tests. Zoho is among the first companies from India to develop an English ASR model, with plans to expand to other Indian and European languages.
To facilitate the adoption of agentic technology, Zoho has developed a roster of AI agents integrated into its products. These agents can be used across various business activities, handling relevant actions based on the user's role. For instance, the Customer Service Agent for Zoho Desk can process incoming customer requests, understand the context, and either respond directly or escalate them to a human representative, providing an efficient first line of assistance.
Zoho's platform-wide conversational AI assistant, Ask Zia, has been enhanced with additional business intelligence skills tailored to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists. It can build end-to-end data pipelines, analyze data, create reports and dashboards in an interactive conversation mode, and assist in building machine learning models.
Zia Agent Studio and marketplace
Zoho has further simplified the Zia Agent Studio experience to be fully prompt-based, with the option to use low-code. This includes ready-made access to over 700 actions across Zoho's products. Agents built by users can be deployed autonomously, triggered by button click, with rule-based automation, or even summoned within customer conversations.
At the time of deployment, an agent can be provisioned as a digital employee, maintaining the user access permission structure defined within the organization. Admins can perform behavioral audits as well as performance and impact analyses on digital employees, ensuring that every agent is working as effectively as possible and within clear guardrails.
Several pre-built agents are now available for users, such as the Candidate Screener, which identifies and ranks the most suitable candidates for a specific job opening based on role requirements, skills, experience, and other key attributes. The Deal Analyzer can analyze deals and provide insights such as win probability, next best action, and follow-up suggestions. The Revenue Growth Specialist suggests opportunities for upsell and cross-sell for existing customers.
Zoho has also launched AI Agents specifically for Indian businesses for verification of PAN card, Voter ID, Udyog Aadhar, GSTIN, Driving Licence, LPG connection, and Electricity Bill. These can be utilized for a variety of use cases, such as employee background verification by HR teams or for document verification in financial services organizations. These agents are available in the Agent Marketplace, where customers can easily deploy them. Ecosystem partners, ISVs, and individual developers will be able to create agents and host them on the Zia Agents Marketplace in the coming months.
Interoperability and growth in India
Zoho has adopted the model context protocol (MCP), offering its own MCP server with a rich action library across several applications. This allows any MCP client to tap into data and actions from various Zoho apps while respecting the customer's defined permission structures. Zoho's MCP server has more than 15 Zoho tools exposed in Early Access, and more tools will be onboarded in the coming months. With Zoho Flow, third-party tools are also exposed, and Zoho Analytics offers support for a local MCP server.
Zoho's growth trajectory in India has been impressive, with the company reporting a 32% year-on-year growth in 2024. India is Zoho's second-largest market globally, and the top products by revenue include Zoho One, Workplace, CRM Plus, CRM, Books, and Zoho People. The industries driving this growth are ITeS, BFSI, Manufacturing, Retail, and Education. The company's 10-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for India stands at 51%.
Related
