Latest news with #ManiVembu
Time of India
6 days ago
- Business
- Time of India
Zoho courts the enterprise CIO with its own LLM and agentic AI stack
Zoho , a Chennai-headquartered SaaS company, has entered the foundational model arena with the launch of its proprietary large language model , Zia LLM . The announcement, made on the sidelines of its annual Zoholics India conference in Bengaluru, signals a growing ambition to deepen its AI footprint—while maintaining its hallmark focus on privacy and affordability. 'The announcement emphasises Zoho's long-standing aim to build foundational technology focused on the protection of customer data, breadth and depth of capabilities because of the business context, and value,' said Mani Vembu, CEO of Zoho. '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 can utilise AI productively and efficiently.' How can Zoho's move into building its own LLM be viewed then: A bid for strategic differentiation, or a necessary pivot as enterprises demand more sovereignty and cost control over AI? Arun Chandrasekaran, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner, framed it as the former. 'The move is aimed at creating a differentiation for business use cases, targeting efficiency and privacy for customers who can't afford or don't want to rely on large external LLM providers,' he said. A right-sized, In-house stack Built fully in-house and trained using NVIDIA's AI-accelerated computing platform, Zia LLM comprises three model sizes—1.3 billion, 2.6 billion, and 7 billion parameters. Each is optimized separately for distinct business contexts such as structured data extraction, summarisation, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and code generation. This tiered model strategy enables Zoho to balance performance and compute efficiency across user scenarios, a principle the company refers to as 'right-sizing.' It also gives Zoho the flexibility to scale Zia LLM gradually; the first round of parameter increases is expected by the end of 2025. 'By building its own AI stack , Zoho is hoping to appeal to businesses that care about domain-specific AI, AI integrated into business workflows while simultaneously being sovereign and cost efficient,' Chandrasekaran said. To that end, Zoho has launched a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that opens its library of workflow actions to third-party AI agents. While customers can still integrate with external models like ChatGPT, Llama, and DeepSeek, Zia LLM gives them the option to keep their data within Zoho's environment—benefiting from the latest AI capabilities without sending sensitive information to third-party clouds. The model is now deployed across Zoho data centers in the U.S., India, and Europe. Building agents without code The company also debuted Zia Agent Studio, a no-code platform that lets businesses create AI agents embedded directly within Zoho applications. More than 25 pre-built agents are already available, including several tailored for Indian businesses. 'Our differentiation comes from offering agents over our low-code platform so that there is a human in the loop for verification and modification. It is much simpler to verify and make changes in the UI screen than reading the code,' Vembu said. These agents work across business functions. For instance, a Customer Service Agent in Zoho Desk can process customer queries, respond to common issues, or route complex requests to a human agent. Meanwhile, Zoho's AI assistant, Ask Zia, enables interactive conversations to build reports, analyse data, and assist data teams in creating machine learning models. Zoho also launched India-specific agents that can verify documents like PAN, Voter ID, Udyog Aadhar, GSTIN, Driving Licences, and utility bills—targeting use cases in HR and financial services, such as employee background verification or onboarding checks. Eyeing the enterprise, quietly While Zoho has long positioned itself as a champion of small and mid-sized businesses, its expanding AI stack, with built-in governance and observability tools, may signal broader ambitions. 'While Zoho will remain committed to SMBs, its AI platform capabilities, governance tooling, and agentic capabilities suggest it is testing the waters for enterprise traction. Perhaps they are eyeing upmarket expansion without abandoning affordability,' Chandrasekaran said. That shift could mean rethinking pricing, too. As CIOs evaluate Zoho's AI agents and LLM stack for enterprise deployment, traditional SaaS models may not apply, Chandrasekaran noted: 'CIOs will scrutinize data privacy , extensibility, grounding mechanisms, observability, and interoperability, especially with existing enterprise data and APIs. Also, Agentic AI is giving rise to new pricing models that can potentially challenge the seat-based pricing model of SaaS. How well Zoho can embrace new pricing models (such as usage-based or outcome-based pricing) will be critical for its success with CIOs.'
United News of India
7 days ago
- Business
- United News of India
Zoho unveils Zia LLM to accelerate business automation
Business Economy New Delhi, July 18 (UNI) In a forerunner step to pace up business automation, Zoho Corporation, an Indian multinational company, introduced the latest set of AI products, including Zia LLM. It's powered up by LLM or Large Language Models. Zia LLM is specifically designed to offer contextual and domain-specific intelligence. It enables users to safeguard their data. This advanced model is built using Nvidia's AI-accelerated technology. Zoho CEO Mani Vembu pointed out that the model is trained extensively for business use cases and data safety concerns. This tool will ensure that users can easily access the advanced AI-enabled technologies. This launch is followed by the recent acquisition of Asimov Robotics. It signals the company's deep interest in AI and robotics. Experts pointed out that this dual focus will lead to the launch of more exciting LLM-powered tools in the future. UNI SAS PRS
Mint
18-07-2025
- Business
- Mint
Zoho sees India as fastest-growing market as enterprise deals accelerate
India's largest privately held tech services firm, Zoho Corp., expects India's small businesses and enterprises to generate more than $1 billion in revenue within the next five fiscal years, its new chief executive, Mani Vembu, told Mint on Thursday. Speaking with Mint, Mani Vembu, who took over after his elder brother Sreedhar stepped down to become 'chief scientist' of the Zoho group in January this year, projected that demand for digital services from 63 million-plus homegrown small and medium businesses (SMBs) can make India alone generate more than $1 billion within the next five fiscals. 'With how the India story is now evolving, we expect business in this geography to grow more than 30% year-on-year for five straight fiscals. For the past 10 fiscals, revenue from India has grown at a compounded rate of 51% annually—today, it contributes 15% of our overall revenue,' Vembu told Mint. Zoho is India's biggest privately held tech services provider. It competes for revenue with peers LTIMindtree, Mphasis, Coforge, Persistent Services and others. In FY23, the company reported that its group revenue crossed $1 billion. At the time of going to press, Zoho had yet to file its FY24 and FY25 financials. Vembu said that as of FY25, India generated 15% of the company's revenue. North America still accounts for nearly half of Zoho Corp's revenue, but is a slowing geography due to inflation concerns and macroeconomic uncertainties—as well as a transition phase in technology due to enterprises being disrupted by artificial intelligence. Over the past week, four of India's top five IT services firms reported quarterly revenue declines—driven by weakness in North America. India, on this note, has already proven to be a ground that can offer large deals—as seen in Tata Consultancy Services' (TCS) $1.83-billion deal with state-run telecom operator Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd in May 2023. This quarter, the completion of the BSNL deal, coupled with a slowdown in North America, clearly hurt TCS—India's largest tech services outsourcing firm. Industry analysts added that efforts to amplify revenue from India—typically a muted market for IT services firms—is a rising industry trend. Akshay Khanna, managing partner at tech consulting firm Avasant, said that while'India has not contributed significantly so far, lately there has been a shift, even though India accounts for less than 10% of the industry's net revenue.' 'Generating broad-based revenue from India is all about catching enterprises at the right time. The same goes for small and medium businesses, who could potentially grow to be larger companies in due time,' Khanna added. Vembu also claimed that, driven by Sreedhar, the company spends 'up to 35% of its revenue' on research and development initiatives. On Thursday, the company unveiled its own, 7 billion-parameter large language model, which it is implementing across its own software offerings—and replacing third-party models such as OpenAI's GPT and Google's Gemini. A senior equity analyst at a Mumbai-based brokerage, requesting anonymity, said that such moves are 'largely to attempt cost arbitrage in tech services firms, where leveraging margin expansion is perhaps the biggest factor to ensure that an operation remains profitable'. 'Zoho had otherwise seen a steady phase of growth until FY23, but over the past years, has switched to an India-focused growth strategy—a factor that might just help it jump ahead of some of its peers in grabbing an early share of small businesses undertaking digital transformation,' the analyst added. However, Mint could not independently ascertain Vembu's R&D spending claim. So far, the company acquired Asimov Robotics earlier this year but has put its battery manufacturing and semiconductor industry plans on the back burner after neither materialised in terms of technical know-how or product-market fit.
The Hindu
17-07-2025
- Business
- The Hindu
Zoho develops AI-powered large language model with speech recognition
Zoho, a Chennai-based technology company, on Thursday unveiled a slew of AI platforms, including its much-touted, proprietary Zia LLM, an AI-powered large language model with automatic speech recognition capability (speech to text) for English and Hindi. Zia LLM was built completely in-house by leveraging NVIDIA's AI-accelerated computing platform, said Zoho. The company also unveiled Zia Agent Studio, a no-code/low-code agent builder with over 700 built-in actions and over 25 prebuilt AI agents, including several tailored for Indian customers. The launch also included a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, which allows third-party agents to access actions from Zoho apps securely, with interoperability and governance in place. These launches were part of Zoho's broader AI strategy focused on privacy, contextual intelligence, and efficiency, the company said. These launches emphasised Zoho's long-standing aim to build foundational technology focused on the protection of customer data, breadth and depth of capabilities because of the business context, and value, Mani Vembu, CEO, Zoho, said on the sidelines of Zoholics India, the company's annual user conference held here. '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 can utilise AI productively and efficiently,' he explained. Zoho's differentiation came from offering agents over its low-code platform so that there was a human in the loop for verification and modification, Mr. Vembu said, adding, '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,' he added. According to Mr. Vembu, India is one of Zoho's top markets and the company grew by 32% in 2024 in India.
Indian Express
17-07-2025
- Business
- Indian Express
Zoho unveils foundational LLM ‘Zia', alongside enterprise AI agents and speech recognition tech
Zoho has jumped into the AI race with its first proprietary large language model (LLM) that is designed for enterprise use cases such as structured data extraction, summarisation, code generation, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Zia LLM was built completely in-house by leveraging NVIDIA's AI accelerated computing platform, the enterprise software company said in a press release on Thursday, July 17. The LLM is made up of three underlying base models in varying sizes: 1.3 billion, 2.6 billion, and 7 billion parameters. The parameter count of an AI model reflects its capacity to learn and generate complex responses. Each of the models were 'separately trained' and 'optimised for contextual applicability that benchmark competitively against comparable open source models in the market,' as per Zoho. Our big AI announcement today. First, Zia LLM with 3 completely home-grown models with 1.3 billion, 2.6 billion and 7 billion parameters, that focus on various business use cases. Second, two completely home grown automatic speech to text models for English and Hindi, optimised… — Sridhar Vembu (@svembu) July 17, 2025 The move comes months after the company abandoned its $700 million plan to foray into chip manufacturing after struggling to find the right technology partner to aid in the complex chip-making processes. It also comes at a time when the Indian government is looking to develop a domestic LLM of its own. The IT Ministry has short-listed four startups, Sarvam AI, Soket AI Labs, and to build a foundational AI model under the Rs 10,300 crore-IndiaAI mission. 'Today's announcement emphasizes Zoho's longstanding aim to build foundational technology focused on protection of customer data, breadth and depth of capabilities, and value. Because Zoho's AI initiatives are developed internally, we are able to provide customers with cutting-edge tool sets without compromising data privacy and organisational flexibility, democratising the latest technology on a global scale,' Mani Vembu, CEO of Zoho, said in a statement. Zia LLM is currently undergoing internal testing and will be available to customers in the coming months. It will be deployed across Zoho's data centres in the US, India, and Europe, the company said. It has not revealed the pricing of these AI offerings. Aside from its in-house LLM, Zoho also announced it has developed two new Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models capable of converting speech to text using AI. It currently only works for English and Hindi, with support for additional languages coming in the future. In terms of performance, Zoho said that the ASR models scored 75 per cent better than comparable models across standard benchmarks. It also said the data of customers using Zia LLM will be stored on Zoho servers and will not be sent to external AI cloud providers. Zoho is further rolling out over 25 ready-to-deploy AI-powered agents capable of undertaking various business activities and handling relevant actions related to sales development, customer support, account management, revenue growth, deal analysis, and candidate screening. These pre-built AI agents can be deployed by customers using Zoho's Agent Marketplace. It has also upgraded its AI agent building platform called Zia Agent Studio, launched earlier this year, to include ready-made access to over 700 actions across Zoho's products. In addition, Zoho has adopted the model context protocol (MCP) which lets customers tap into third-party AI agents as well. Moving forward, Zoho plans to develop an AI reasoning model along with expanding the available languages used by its speech-to-text models.
