Zoho Creator gets AI boost for smarter, faster app development

With its idea-to-app generation feature, Zoho Creator enables business users to build complete applications—automations, dashboards, and permission sets—by leveraging ZohoAI or OpenAI through prompts, diagrams, or system documentation like software requirement specifications

Zoho Corporation has introduced a new set of AI-powered features within Zoho Creator, its low-code application development platform, reinforcing its commitment to delivering practical, real-time, and secure AI solutions for business users.

CoCreator, a new addition to the Zoho Creator platform, facilitates faster, simpler, and more intelligent app building with the use of voice and written prompts, process flows, and business specification documents. CoCreator speeds up go-to-market timeframes and democratises app creation for users of diverse skill levels–all without requiring add-ons to a customer's existing subscription. It is powered by Zia, Zoho's AI engine.

Zia has been the foundational AI bridge across Zoho's product portfolio of 55+ applications, including Zoho Creator, since its launch in 2015.  As AI becomes central to business operations, Zoho's ownership of its tech stack and deep AI integration provide customers with a higher level of contextual AI across all company workflows compared to competitors. It also allows for a tool that understands a business user's data and anticipates how it can be utilised.

"Since Zoho Creator's introduction in 2006, we have been laser-focused on simplifying and speeding up the app development process without sacrificing functionality. This focus has enabled our users to launch millions of business-critical applications successfully," said Bharath Kumar B, Head of Marketing and Customer Experience, Zoho Creator. "AI allows us to take it to another level. We are now able to help users transform abstract business ideas into apps, while raising the baseline on speed of quality app creation with deep capabilities. Keeping with Zoho's philosophy, we are incorporating this capability into our main platform–no additional or hidden costs."

AI-powered app creation simplified

With idea-to-app generation feature, business users can leverage ZohoAI or OpenAI to develop full-fledged applications including, automations, permission sets and insightful dashboards. By using text or voice prompts, process flow diagrams, or systems documentations like software requirement specifications (SRS), Creator will provide domain-specific suggestions, ideas for relevant fields, and modules tailored to a customer's business.

Furthermore, business users can leverage AI to generate application components to enhance their existing applications. Zia will also proactively recommend contextual fields within an existing form, a feature missing in most similar low-code app development tools. With this new update, various developer personas can leverage Zia's prompts to automatically generate contextual code blocks tailored to application requirements and structure. This feature can also be used to optimise and annotate existing code blocks for ideal performance.

Creator also offers enhanced AI-powered data cleansing and modelling capabilities that remove inconsistencies and bring logical structure to the data. Business users can quickly transform unstructured data from various file types and databases into customised apps.

With the AI Skills capability, businesses can develop applications with advanced cognitive capabilities that interpret natural language commands, analyse business context, and orchestrate complex action sequences (powered by Zoho's proprietary Deluge scripting language and specialised AI models) to intelligently automate everyday processes.  (This feature is currently available in early access, and will be available to all in June 2025.) Lastly, users can also deploy custom AI models for capabilities like OCR, prediction, and object detection.