Zoho Unveils In-House AI Models and Agent platform

News

1. India to Roll Out First Homegrown Chip From CG Semi's Sanand plant

2. Anthropic Foils AI-Powered Cybercrime Spree

3. Team Computers and Yotta Data Services Partner to Accelerate AI Adoption in India

4. Databricks to Buy Enterprise Feature Store Tecton

5. OutSystems Names Ganesh to Accelerate AI-Powered Low-Code Growth in India

6. OpenAI to Open First India Office in Delhi by Year End

Zoho has announced a slate of proprietary AI technologies, including its own large language model (LLM), speech recognition models, no-code agent builder, and a new interoperability server in a push to embed AI deeply across its business software suite while keeping customer data secure.

The Chennai-headquartered firm introduced Zia LLM, an LLM trained entirely in-house for business-specific use cases, alongside automatic speech recognition (ASR) models in English and Hindi.

It also launched Zia Agent Studio, a no-code or low-code builder to create and deploy AI agents, and rolled out 25 prebuilt AI agents, some tailored for Indian business needs. The announcements were made at Zoholics India, the company’s annual user conference held in Bengaluru.

“Our LLM is trained specifically for business use cases with privacy and governance at its core,” said Mani Vembu, CEO of Zoho. “This lowers inference costs for customers and allows them to use AI productively and efficiently. We are also enabling co-creation with AI agents, keeping humans in the loop for verification and modification.”

The company said its India business grew 32% in 2024, cementing its position as Zoho’s second largest market globally.

Built using NVIDIA’s accelerated computing platform, Zia LLM comprises three models, designed to balance power and resource use based on the task at hand. The models are already being tested internally and are slated for customer use in coming months.

The ASR models, designed to convert speech to text in English and Hindi, are optimized for low computing load and benchmark up to 75% better than comparable models, Zoho said. The company plans to add more Indian and European languages in the future.

Zia Agent Studio lets businesses build and deploy AI agents with over 700 built-in actions from Zoho’s apps. Several prebuilt agents are already available, including Customer Service Agent for Zoho Desk, Candidate Screener for HR, Deal Analyser for sales, and Revenue Growth Specialist for customer upselling and cross-selling.

Indian businesses can also access agents that verify documents such as PAN cards, Voter IDs, GSTINs, and driving licenses. These are accessible via Zoho’s Agent Marketplace, which will soon be open to third-party developers to contribute their own agents.

Zoho also plans to expand Ask Zia, its conversational AI assistant, to serve finance and customer support teams, and enable collaboration between agents through an Agent2Agent protocol.

The company’s new Model Context Protocol (MCP) server allows secure, permission-aware access to Zoho apps by third-party agents, enabling interoperable AI workflows. Zoho has already exposed 15 of its own tools via MCP in early access and plans to expand coverage soon.