Latest news with #ZiaAgentStudio
Daily Tribune
12 hours ago
- Business
- Daily Tribune
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.
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.
Techday NZ
17-07-2025
- Business
- Techday NZ
Zoho unveils Zia LLM & agent marketplace with focus on privacy
Zoho has introduced its proprietary large language model, Zia LLM, alongside new AI infrastructure investments designed to strengthen its business-focused artificial intelligence offerings and data privacy protections. The suite of new tools includes the Zia LLM, over 25 prebuilt AI-powered agents available in an Agent Marketplace, the no-code Zia Agent Studio for custom agent building, and a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, providing third-party agents access to Zoho's extensive library of actions. These advancements are intended for both developers and end users, aiming to bring operational and financial efficiencies across a wide range of business needs and use cases. Focus on technology and privacy "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," said Mani Vembu, Chief Executive Officer at Zoho. "Because Zoho's AI initiatives are developed internally, we are able to provide customers with cutting-edge tool sets without compromising data privacy and organizational flexibility, democratizing the latest technology on a global scale." The Zia LLM was developed entirely in-house using NVIDIA's AI accelerated computing platform and has been trained for Zoho product-specific use cases such as structured data extraction, summarisation, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and code generation. The model is comprised of three parameter sizes - 1.3 billion, 2.6 billion, and 7 billion - each optimised for different business contexts and benchmarked against similar open-source models. Zoho says these models allow the platform to optimise performance according to user needs, balancing computational power with efficiency, and plans to continue evolving its right-sizing approach to AI model deployment. The Zia LLM will be rolled out across data centres in the United States, India, and Europe, initially being used to support internal Zoho applications and expected to become available for customer deployment in the coming months. Expansion in language and speech technology Alongside its language model, Zoho is launching proprietary Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models capable of performing speech-to-text conversion in both English and Hindi. These models operate with low computational requirements without a reduction in accuracy and, according to Zoho, can deliver up to 75% better performance than comparable models in standard benchmark tests. Additional language support is expected to follow, particularly for languages predominantly spoken in Europe and India. While many large language model integrations are supported on the Zoho platform, including ChatGPT, Llama, and DeepSeek, the company emphasises that Zia LLM enables customers to maintain their data on Zoho's servers, thus retaining control over privacy and security. Agentic AI technology To promote adoption of agentic AI, Zoho has made available a range of AI agents embedded within its core products. These agents are tailored to support various common organisational functions such as sales, customer service, and account management. The newly updated Ask Zia conversational assistant now features business intelligence skills suitable for data engineers, analysts, and data scientists, allowing them to build data pipelines, create analytical reports, and initiate machine learning processes within an interactive environment. A new Customer Service Agent has also been launched, capable of processing and contextualising customer requests, providing direct responses, or escalating queries to human staff as needed. Zia Agent Studio and Marketplace The Zia Agent Studio offers a fully prompt-based, optional low-code environment for building and deploying AI agents, giving users access to more than 700 predefined actions spanning the Zoho app ecosystem. Agents can be set for autonomous operation, triggered by user action, or integrated into customer communications. When deployed, these agents function as digital employees, adhering to existing organisational access permissions and allowing administrators to audit behaviour, performance, and impact. Zoho's Agent Marketplace, now part of its existing marketplace offering over 2,500 extensions, allows for rapid deployment of prebuilt and third-party AI agents. A selection of prebuilt agents is available, including: Revenue Growth Specialist, identifying opportunities for customer upsell and cross-sell Deal Analyser, which provides insights such as win probability and proposed follow-up actions for sales teams Candidate Screener, ranking job applicants based on skills and suitability Zoho has committed to regularly adding more prebuilt agents to address broader business needs and enabling ecosystem partners, independent software vendors, and developers to build and host additional agents. MCP interoperability and future roadmap The deployment of the Model Context Protocol server will permit any MCP client to access data and actions from a growing collection of Zoho applications within the customer's existing permission framework. Using Zoho Flow, certain third-party tools can also be accessed, and Zoho Analytics now includes support for a local MCP server. Expanded application support is planned throughout the year. Looking forward, Zoho intends to scale the Zia LLM's parameter sizes and extend speech-to-text capabilities to more languages. Plans also include the future release of a reasoning language model, further enhancements to Ask Zia's skills for finance and support teams, and the addition of protocol support for agent intercommunication within and beyond Zoho's platform. Zoho remains focused on balancing the ability to provide practical AI support for business needs with privacy requirements, stating that its models are not trained on consumer data and that no customer information is retained. The company reiterates its privacy pledge to customers, with complete oversight of data held in its own operated data centres.
Business Wire
17-07-2025
- Business
- Business Wire
Zoho Launches Zia LLM and Deepens AI Portfolio with Prebuilt Agents, Custom Agent Builder, MCP, and Marketplace
AUSTIN, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Zoho Corporation, a global technology company, today announced additional investments and offerings in AI, including Zia LLM, a proprietary large language model; Zia Agents, with 25+ ready-to-deploy AI-powered agents available in Agent Marketplace; Zia Agent Studio, a no-code agent builder; and a model context protocol (MCP) server to open up Zoho's vast library of actions to third-party agents. These capabilities and investments are designed to help organizations fully realize and maximize the value of contextual, assistive and agentic AI technology. Immediately impacting daily workflows for diverse roles and use cases, Zoho's latest AI developments deliver operational and financial efficiencies across entire organizations. "Zoho's AI initiatives are developed internally, allowing us to provide customers with cutting-edge tool sets without compromising data privacy and organizational flexibility, democratizing the latest technology on a global scale."- Mani Vembu, CEO at Zoho Share "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," said Mani Vembu, CEO at Zoho. "Because Zoho's AI initiatives are developed internally, we are able to provide customers with cutting-edge tool sets without compromising data privacy and organizational flexibility, democratizing the latest technology on a global scale." Zia LLM, Built from the Ground Up and Optimized for Business 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, summarization, RAG, and code generation—Zia LLM is comprised of three models with 1.3 billion, 2.6 billion and 7 billion parameters, each separately trained and optimized for contextual applicability that benchmark competitively against comparable open source models in the market. The three models allow Zoho to always optimize the right model for the right user context, striking the proper balance between power and resource management. This focus on right-sizing the model is an ongoing development strategy for Zoho. In addition to Zia LLM, Zoho is announcing two proprietary Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models for speech-to-text conversion for both English and Hindi. Optimized to perform on a low computer load without compromising on accuracy, the models benchmark up to 75% better than comparable models across standard tests. Language support for additional languages will be coming in the future. 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. Zia LLM will be deployed across Zoho's data centers in the US, India, and Europe. 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. Effective Native AI Agents Ready for Use To enable immediate adoption of agentic technology, 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 real-life organizational roles (including sales development, customer support, and account management). Agents available today include: New Version of Ask Zia: The latest version of Zoho's platform-wide conversational AI assistant, Ask Zia 's new BI skills are tailored to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists, yet supports any user within an organization. Ask Zia is now equipped with capabilities that directly address the unique pain points faced by each persona, whether it's building end-to-end data pipelines for engineers, analyzing data, creating reports and dashboards in an interactive conversation mode for analysts, or helping to jump start building ML models for data scientists. Customer Service Agent: With the ability to process incoming customer requests, understand the context behind them, and either answer them directly or triage them to a human rep, the Customer Service Agent for Zoho Desk provides an efficient yet reliable first line of assistance, paving the way for quicker responses and resolutions. AI Agent Studio and Marketplace 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 include ready-made access to over 700 actions across Zoho's products. Agents built by users can be deployed autonomously, triggered through button click or rule-based automation, or summoned within customer conversations. At the time of deployment, an agent can also be provisioned as a digital employee. Digital Employees respect defined user access permissions, maintaining the same permissions structures already defined within the organization. Admins are able to perform behavioral 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. Zoho Marketplace, which supplies over 2500 reliable extensions and integrations for Zoho users, now houses the Agent Marketplace, a dedicated section for AI agents that can be deployed by customers quickly. Ecosystem partners, ISVs, and individual developers will soon be able to create agents and host them on the Zia Agents Marketplace, further simplifying the adoption of agentic technology by organizations. Some pre-built agents created with Zia Agent Studio (and available on the Zia Agent Marketplace) are: Revenue Growth Specialist: Uncovers opportunities for upsell and cross-sell across existing customers, recommending the best marketing approach for each customer. Deal Analyzer: Analyze deals and provide insights such as win probability, next best action, and follow-up suggestions. Candidate Screener: Intelligently identifies and ranks the most suitable candidates for a specific job opening based on role requirements, skills, experience, and other key attributes. Zoho will continue to add more pre-built agents to the Agent Marketplace over time to cover several valuable core and utility use cases across various business functions. The full list of available agents can be found under Additional Documentation. With over 55 applications across one ecosystem, users can build agents to meet their organization's every need, no matter how specific. With Zia Agent Studio, Zoho users have access to the same tools as Zoho's developers, ensuring that any agent a customer dreams of can be created with ease. Interoperability with MCP Zoho has adopted the model context protocol (MCP), offering its own MCP server with a rich action library across several applications, allowing any MCP client to tap into data and actions from various Zoho apps while respecting the customer's defined permission structures. Zoho's MCP server has a library of actions from more than 15 Zoho applications exposed during Early Access. With Zoho Flow, third party tools are also exposed. Additional Zoho applications will be onboarded in the coming months. Furthermore, Zoho Analytics now offers support for a local MCP server. Roadmap In the short term, Zoho will regularly scale Zia LLM's model sizes, starting with the first of several planned parameter increases by the end of 2025. Future planned releases include expanding the available languages used by the speech-to-text model, beginning with languages spoken primarily across Europe and India, as well as the introduction of a reasoning language model (RLM). Additional skills will be added to Ask Zia, allowing it to act as an assistant to Finance teams and Customer Support teams, with more skills added in the future. Support for the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol will be implemented, allowing for Zia Agents to interact and collaborate with each other, as well as collaborate with agents on other platforms. Additional Documentation Zia Agent Marketplace - Full list of available agents at launch Disclaimer All trademarks, product names, and company names cited herein are the property of their respective owners. Availability and Pricing Zia LLM will be available to Zoho customers in the coming months. Zia Agents, Zia Agent Studio, Agent Marketplace, and Zoho MCP Server are being rolled out to customers who are currently on the early access waiting list. General availability for these offerings is expected towards the end of 2025. Zoho expects to study the usage patterns of these customers across use cases, industries, geographical regions, and sizes during this early access phase. A pricing structure for these offerings can be expected at the time of general availability. Zoho Artificial Intelligence Differentiation Zoho is committed to designing and incorporating artificial intelligence guided by the principles of customer privacy and value. Our generic AI models across contextual, assistive, and agentic AI, are not trained on consumer data and do not retain customer information. Zoho builds AI tools with usefulness in mind, striking a balance between providing AI technology that assists workers while right-sizing models that don't require burdening consumers with additional costs. Zoho Privacy Pledge Zoho respects user privacy and does not have an ad-revenue model in any part of its business, including its free products. The company owns and operates its data centers, ensuring complete oversight of customer data, privacy, and security. More than 130 million users around the world, across hundreds of thousands of companies, rely on Zoho everyday to run their businesses, including Zoho itself. For more information, please visit: About Zoho With 55+ apps in nearly every major business category, Zoho Corporation is one of the world's most prolific technology companies. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, with international headquarters in Chennai, India, Zoho is privately held and profitable with more than 18,000 employees. For more information, please visit:
Channel Post MEA
14-02-2025
- Business
- Channel Post MEA
Zoho Announces its Latest Suite of AI Offerings for the Middle East
Zoho announced that its cutting-edge AI offerings, Zia Agents, Agent Studio, and Agent Marketplace, will be rolled out soon in the region. These new solutions represent a significant advancement in Zoho's AI virtual assistant, Zia, which utilises Agentic AI. This specialised subset of AI enables digital agents to make decisions, pursue complex tasks, and take autonomous actions with minimal human intervention. 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
