Zoho Corporation (Zoho) has expanded the scope of its AI-powered assistant for business, Zia, with the announcement of Zia Agents, Zia Agent Studio, and Agent Marketplace, further expanding its AI-driven automation capabilities across its ecosystem. "Together, these solutions empower enterprises to access, build, and distribute intelligent, autonomous digital agents across their organisations," Zoho Corporation said on Tuesday, February 4, 2025.
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Zoho's New AI Capabilities
Starting Tuesday, Zoho and its IT management division, ManageEngine, will preview several pre-built Zia Agents, with a full rollout planned in the coming weeks across Zoho's portfolio of over 100 products, the company said.
"The speed of disruption and quality of innovation we are seeing in our industry right now has encouraged me to focus on my passion area, technology. I will devote more time to hands-on technical work for the company, spearheading several deep R&D initiatives, beginning with AI," said Sridhar Vembu, Zoho Corporation's Co-founder and Chief Scientist.
AI Evolution at Zoho
Zoho Corporation says its in-house AI has evolved over the past decade from proactive to prescriptive to generative to agentic.
Zia (2015): The foundational AI for intelligent automation across Zoho apps. The company says Zia possesses a vast and diverse skillset, with new skills being implemented regularly to boost customer experience and drive productivity.
Ask Zia (2018): A system-wide conversational AI assistant that helps employees work smarter and accomplish tasks more effectively.
Zia Agents (2024): Pre-built digital agents, including Account Manager, SDR, HR, Customer Support, IT Help Desk, and SalesCoach, designed to handle specific business functions.
"For customers, partners, and developers looking to create their own agents, Zoho is launching Zia Agent Studio, allowing them to build and deploy customised agents with inherited skillsets, which can then be distributed through Zoho's Agent Marketplace," the company said.
For enterprises looking to build customised AI solutions, Zia Agent Studio provides a no-code/low-code platform, enabling the creation of cross-functional agents. According to the company, these agents can integrate seamlessly across Zoho applications and will soon be deployable in third-party software. Additionally, the Agent Marketplace will allow businesses and developers to distribute and access AI agents tailored to industry-specific needs.
Zoho Corporation said the "new agentic platform will advance Zoho Corporation's decade-long investment in AI to deliver unparalleled context and data-driven customer value," adding that these capabilities will begin to roll out to a limited set of customers, which will expand monthly.
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Zoho to Leverage NVIDIA Platform
In October of last year, Zoho Corporation announced that it would leverage Nvidia's AI computing platform—which includes Nvidia NeMo, part of Nvidia AI Enterprise software—to build and deploy its large language models (LLMs) in its SaaS applications. "Over the past year, the company has invested more than USD 10 million in Nvidia's AI technology and GPUs, and plans to invest an additional USD 10 million in the coming year." The company made this announcement during the Nvidia AI Summit in Mumbai.
Zoho Launches AI-Powered Zoho Analytics
In September 2024, Zoho launched a new version of Zoho Analytics, an AI-powered self-service BI and analytics platform. The company said it has developed new AI and ML capabilities, enabling diagnostic insights, predictive analysis, and automated report and dashboard generation. Additional advancements to Zoho Analytics include a custom ML model-building studio, integration with OpenAI, and third-party BI platform extensions.