Zoho has launched Zia LLM, the company’s proprietary large language model, a no-code agent builder, Zia Agent Studio, over 25 deployable Zia agents, and a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server to open up Zoho’s vast library of actions to third-party agents. The announcements were made on the sidelines of Zoholics Kenya, the company’s annual user conference held this year in Nairobi.
“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 Premanand Velumani, Associate Director, Strategic Growth Zoho MEA. “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.”
“Our differentiation comes from offering agents over our low code platform so that there is a human in the loop for verification and modification. We call this co-creation with the AI agent. It is much simpler to verify and make changes in the UI screen than reading the code. We are enabling this across all the features to make it simpler to verify and validate the AI output. By developing our AI solutions entirely in-house, we maintain strict control over data privacy while offering powerful, flexible capabilities that serve customers in Kenya, one of our key markets,” said Veerakumar Natarajan, Country Head for Zoho Kenya.
Zia LLM has been trained with Zoho product use cases in mind, ranging from structured data extraction, summarisation, RAG, and code generation. It 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. Zoho also supports many LLM integrations for users, including ChatGPT, Llama, and DeepSeek.
Zoho has also announced two proprietary Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models for speech-to-text conversion for English and Hindi. Zoho will expand language support for ASR models to enable more inclusive AI adoption across diverse regions. It will also introduce a reasoning language model (RLM).
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.
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.
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.
Several pre-built agents are now available for users, such as:
- 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.
- Deal Analyser, which can analyse deals and provide insights such as win probability, next best action, and follow-up suggestions
- Revenue Growth Specialist, which suggests opportunities for upsell and cross-sell for existing customers.
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.
Zoho’s adoption of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) allows clients to securely access and interact with workflows and actions across over 15 Zoho applications. MCP is available in early access, and integrations via Zoho Flow extend its reach to third-party tools. Zoho Analytics now also supports a local MCP server, allowing for advanced contextual AI use cases while preserving data security and compliance.