Zoho Announces its Latest Suite of AI Offerings for the Middle East
Zoho is introducing Agent Studio, an innovative platform that enables customers, partners, and developers in the MENA region to create their own custom agents, that can be localised to suit the needs of specific industry verticals or to automate custom processes such as VAT filings using AI agents. Zia Agent Studio provides a no-code and low-code environment, allowing partners and customers to design and deploy tailored agents with inherited skill sets, which can then be distributed via Zoho's Agent Marketplace, where Zoho offers a selection of pre-built agents for instant deployment by organisations.
Sridhar Vembu, Co-founder and Chief Scientist at Zoho Corporation, 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. Utilising Zoho's deep engineering expertise, its own data centres, and shared data model, we will develop powerful and usable solutions that drive customer value while retaining our commitment to customer flexibility and data privacy.' Hyther Nizam, President for Middle East and Africa region at Zoho Corporation, said, 'Across the MENA region, there is a collective and strong drive to advance AI initiatives and position the region as a global leader in innovation. Governments and businesses alike are focused on leveraging AI to boost economic growth, enhance productivity, and improve quality of life. Zoho is committed to supporting these ambitious goals by providing intelligent, autonomous AI solutions that enable organisations to stay ahead of the curve and lead in a rapidly evolving technological landscape.'
Zoho and ManageEngine will preview pre-built, task-specific Zia Agents, designed to deploy across Zoho's extensive portfolio of over 100 products in the coming weeks. These intelligent agents are crafted to optimise key business functions, with initial offerings including solutions for Account Management, Sales Development, HR, Customer Support, IT Help Desk, and Sales Coaching.
Zoho's Zia Agent Studio provides a flexible platform for building custom, autonomous agents that meet specific business needs. Users can leverage a wide range of pre-built Zia Skills, tools from Zoho's ecosystem, unified data platform access, and various language models to create agents for specific functions (such as Sales Development or email support) or cross-functional agents (like RFP or loan approval agents). These agents can be deployed across any Zoho application and accessed through Ask Zia, with plans for integration into third-party applications in the future. Zia Agent Studio also supports combining complementary skill sets to create a single agent capable of handling multiple business tasks. 0 0
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Web Release
6 hours ago
- Web Release
Zoho Launches Zia LLM, and Expands AI Suite with Agents and Studio Tools
Zoho Corp., a leading global technology company, announced the launch of 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 in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region to open up Zoho's vast library of actions to third-party agents. '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.' Zia LLM: Custom-Built AI for the Enterprise 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. This focus on right-sizing the model is an ongoing development strategy for Zoho. 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. 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. 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). Prebuilt Agents, Agent Studio and Marketplace Designed for Real-World Impact Zoho has developed a roster of AI agents contextually baked right into its products to enable immediate adoption of agentic technology. 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. At the time of deployment, an agent can be provisioned as a digital employee, maintaining the user access permission structure defined within the organisation. Admins can perform behavioural audits as well as performance and impact analyses on digital employees, ensuring that every agent is working as effectively as possible and within clear guardrails. 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, and 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. Interoperability and Governance 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.
Zawya
a day ago
- Zawya
Zoho launches Zia LLM, and expands AI suite with Agents and Studio Tools
Dubai –: Zoho Corp., a leading global technology company, announced the launch of 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 in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region to open up Zoho's vast library of actions to third-party agents. '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." Zia LLM: Custom-Built AI for the Enterprise 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. This focus on right-sizing the model is an ongoing development strategy for Zoho. 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. 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. 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). Prebuilt Agents, Agent Studio and Marketplace Designed for Real-World Impact Zoho has developed a roster of AI agents contextually baked right into its products to enable immediate adoption of agentic technology. 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. At the time of deployment, an agent can be provisioned as a digital employee, maintaining the user access permission structure defined within the organisation. Admins can perform behavioural audits as well as performance and impact analyses on digital employees, ensuring that every agent is working as effectively as possible and within clear guardrails. 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, and 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. Interoperability and Governance 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. About Zoho With 55+ apps in nearly every major business category, including sales, marketing, customer support, accounting and back-office operations, and an array of productivity and collaboration tools, Zoho Corporation is one of the world's most prolific technology companies. With 100 million users around the world, hundreds of thousands of companies, rely on Zoho every day to run their businesses. Zoho respects user privacy and does not have an ad-revenue model in any part of its business, including its free products. The company is privately held and is headquartered in Chennai, India. Additional offices are in the United States, India, Japan, China, Canada, Singapore, Mexico, Australia, the Netherlands, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. For more information, please visit For media queries, please contact: Mayukh Sikdar Watermelon Communications Dubai, UAE mayukh@
Web Release
6 days ago
- Web Release
ManageEngine Endpoint Central Delivered 442% ROI According to Total Economic Impact Study
ManageEngine, a division of Zoho Corporation and a leading provider of enterprise IT management solutions, today announced the findings of a commissioned Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study, conducted by Forrester Consulting, of Endpoint Central, its unified endpoint management and security (UEMS) platform. The study revealed that a composite organization, which is a representative of interviewed customers, realized a 442% return on investment (ROI) over three years and achieved a full payback within six months. Aimed at capturing real-world outcomes experienced by enterprises using ManageEngine's UEMS platform, the study also found that interviewed customers gained $4.5 million in total benefits over three years, with a net present value (NPV) of $3.7 million. The exercise was carried out independently by Forrester through in-depth interviews with four customers and financial modeling of a composite organization. 'We've always aimed to deliver meaningful outcomes through Endpoint Central, and it's rewarding to see those results consistently reflected in our customers' experiences—and now quantified in this TEI study,' said Mathivanan Venkatachalam, vice president of ManageEngine. 'Many of our customers have significantly reduced operational overhead and administrative burden by replacing multiple tools with Endpoint Central. That's exactly the kind of outcome Endpoint Central was built to deliver.' Key Findings From the Study While ROI is a key outcome, Endpoint Central's broader business impact is evident in the following significant gains realized across productivity, cost, and performance: · Reduced manual patching effort by up to 95% through automated patch management, resulting in $913,000 in productivity gains over three years. · Legacy tool consolidation through Endpoint Central led to over $1 million in savings over a three-year period. · Secure self-service and remote troubleshooting across IT functions were implemented, reducing help desk effort and improving end-user efficiency. · Improved real-time visibility and control over hardware and software assets and efficient reclamation of unused licenses. · Elimination of manual report generation through automated endpoint analytics and reporting workflows. As per the study, Endpoint Central also enhanced the IT team's ability to support users across geographies and work models through its unified interface and management capabilities. Customers experienced greater endpoint stability and improved end-user experience due to reduced downtime and fewer disruptions. Beyond operational efficiency, customers also shared real-world gains in compliance, security posture, and insurance savings. 'Our compliance rate of devices went from 70% to more than 95% after using Endpoint Central. Devices are much more stable and easier to manage. We were even able to save cyber insurance costs due to this increased security posture,' said an IT director in the software services industry in the study. For the complete findings, download the 2025 Forrester Total Economic Impact™ study of ManageEngine Endpoint Central here.
