Zoho advances its AI capabilities

Zoho has announced the launch of a proprietary large language model, Zia LLM, Automatic Speech Recognition models in English and Hindi, a no-code agent builder, Zia Agent Studio, as well as a model context protocol (MCP) server to open up Zoho's vast library of actions to third-party agents. Zoho also launched 25+ ready-to-deploy Zia Agents, including a few specifically for Indian customers. Furthermore, the company revealed that it grew by 32% in 2024 in India, one of its top markets. The announcements were made on the sidelines of Zoholics India, the company's annual user conference held this year in Bengaluru. 

"Today's announcement emphasises Zoho's longstanding aim to build foundational technology focused on protection of customer data, breadth and depth of capabilities because of the business context, and value," said Mani Vembu, CEO, Zoho. "Our LLM model is trained specifically for business use cases, keeping privacy and governance at its core, which has resulted in lowering the inference cost, passing on that value to the customers, while also ensuring that they are able to utilise AI productively and efficiently." 

Zoho has successfully launched its own large language model, Zia LLM, built completely in-house by leveraging NVIDIA's AI accelerated computing platform. Trained with Zoho product use cases in mind—ranging from structured data extraction, summarisation, RAG, and code generation—Zia LLM comprises three models with 1.3 billion, 2.6 billion and 7 billion parameters, each separately trained and optimised for contextual applicability that benchmark competitively against comparable open source models in the market. The three models allow Zoho to always optimise the right model for the right user context, striking the balance between power and resource management. In the short term, Zoho will scale Zia LLM's model sizes, starting with the first set of parameter increases by the end of 2025.

While Zoho supports many LLM integrations for users, including ChatGPT, Llama, and DeepSeek, Zia LLM continues Zoho's commitment to data privacy by allowing customers to keep their data on Zoho servers, leveraging the latest AI capabilities without sending their data to AI cloud providers. Zia LLM has been deployed across Zoho's data centres in the US, India, and Europe. The model is currently testing for internal use cases across Zoho's broad app portfolio, and will be available for customer use in coming months.

Zoho also announced two proprietary Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models for speech-to-text conversion for English and Hindi. Optimised to perform on a low computer load without compromising on accuracy, the models benchmark up to 75% better than comparable models across standard tests. The company plans to expand the available languages, beginning with other Indian and European languages. It will also introduce a reasoning language model (RLM).

Prebuilt Agents, AI Agent Studio, and Marketplace

To enable immediate adoption of agentic technology, Zoho has developed a roster of AI agents contextually baked right into its products. These agents can be used across various business activities, handling relevant actions based on the role of the user. These include Customer Service Agent for Zoho Desk that can process incoming customer requests, understand the context, and either answer directly or triage them to a human rep, providing an efficient first line of assistance. Ask Zia, Zoho's platform-wide conversational AI assistant, is bolstered with additional BI skills, tailored to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists, while supporting all users within an organisation. It can build end-to-end data pipelines for engineers, analyse data, create reports and dashboards in an interactive conversation mode for analysts, or help jump start building ML models for data scientists.

First announced earlier in 2025, Zoho has further simplified the Zia Agent Studio experience to be fully prompt-based (with the option to use low-code) and 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.

The company 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 utilised for a variety of use cases, such as employee background verification by HR teams or for document verification in financial services organisations. These agents are available in Agent Marketplace from 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 coming months.

 The company plans to add more skills to Ask Zia, allowing it to act as an assistant to Finance teams, Customer Support teams to start with. Support for the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol will be implemented, allowing Zia Agents to interact and collaborate with each other, as well as collaborate with agents on other platforms.

Interoperability and Governance

Zoho has adopted the model context protocol (MCP), offering its own MCP server with a rich action library across several applications, allowing 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 in the coming months, more tools will be onboarded. With Zoho Flow, third-party tools are also exposed. Additionally, Zoho Analytics offers support for a local MCP server. Additional Zoho tools will be on-boarded in the coming months.