Latest news with #ZohoCorporation


United News of India
4 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
5 days ago
- Business
- Mint
Zoho Zia LLM launched with speech-to-text models and AI agent marketplace: All you need to know
Zoho Corporation has announced a major expansion of its artificial intelligence (AI) offerings, including its own large language models (Zia LLM), speech-to-text systems for English and Hindi, and new AI-powered tools to help businesses automate tasks. These tools are being introduced to improve everyday work across different departments like sales, customer support, and data analysis. Sridhar Vembu, Chief Scientist at Zoho, shared the news on X, saying, '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 to perform with high accuracy in relatively modest hardware.' 'We will support other Indian languages over time. Third, AI Agent Studio and a variety of pre-built agents that rely on a choice of open source or commercial LLM APIs, and customers can choose the LLMs they want to use. Fourth, Zoho MCP Server for interoperability,' added Vembu. The Zia LLM has been developed completely in-house using NVIDIA's AI platform. The models were trained with real business tasks in mind, such as summarising reports, extracting data, answering questions, and writing code. The three different model sizes allow Zoho to match the right AI power to the right job. Zoho has also launched two speech recognition models for converting spoken English and Hindi into text. These are designed to work well even on devices with limited computing power, while still delivering accurate results. More Indian and European languages will be added in the future. To help companies use AI more easily, Zoho introduced Zia Agent Studio, a tool that allows users to create their own AI assistants (agents) without coding. These agents can carry out tasks automatically, respond to customer queries, or help teams with analysis. Over 700 built-in actions are available across Zoho's product suite. The Agent Marketplace, now live within Zoho's platform, offers more than 25 pre-made AI agents. These include: Customer Service Agent: Handles and routes customer support requests. Candidate Screener: Ranks job applicants based on required skills and experience. Deal Analyser: Reviews sales deals and suggests next steps. Revenue Growth Specialist: Identifies ways to upsell and cross-sell to customers. Developers and partners will also be able to build their own agents and share them on the Marketplace soon. Another part of the announcement is the Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server, which allows AI agents to access actions and data across more than 15 Zoho apps. This is meant to help different AI systems work together while respecting user privacy and permission settings. These new AI tools are currently being tested by early access users. General availability is expected by the end of 2025. Pricing will be shared closer to the full launch. Zoho said that its AI systems are not trained on customer data and are designed with privacy in mind. The company plans to improve its AI tools further, by increasing model sizes, adding support for more languages, and introducing new types of models that can reason and solve more complex problems.
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Zoho Launches Zia LLM and Deepens AI Portfolio with Prebuilt Agents, Custom Agent Builder, MCP, and Marketplace
Homegrown, Business-Optimized Technology Addresses Needs for Developers and End Users While Enhancing Platform Capabilities AUSTIN, Texas, July 17, 2025--(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. "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: View source version on Contacts Media Contacts: Sandra Loslo@ Nanya Srivastavananya.s@ Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data


Business Wire
5 days ago
- 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:


Business Wire
08-07-2025
- Business
- Business Wire
Shadow AI as a Strategic Advantage: ManageEngine Report Points the Way Forward
AUSTIN, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- ManageEngine, a division of Zoho Corporation and a leading provider of enterprise IT management solutions, today released its report, The Shadow AI Surge in Enterprises: Insights from the U.S. and Canadian Workplace. Based on a survey of IT decision makers (ITDMs) and business employees, the report investigates the rise of shadow AI—unauthorized AI tools used for work—and identifies critical gaps that organizations need to close if they want to reduce the risks of shadow AI and turn it into a strategic advantage. The rise: 60% of employees are using unapproved AI tools more than they were a year ago, and 93% of employees admit to inputting information into AI tools without approval. The risks: 63% of ITDMs see data leakage or exposure as the primary risk of shadow AI. Conversely, 91% of employees think shadow AI poses no risk, not much risk, or some risk that's outweighed by reward. The rewards: Summarizing notes or calls (55%), brainstorming (55%), and analyzing data or reports (47%) are the top tasks employees complete with shadow AI. Generative AI text tools (73%), AI writing tools (60%), and code assistants (59%) are the top AI tools ITDMs have approved for employee use. 'Shadow AI represents both the greatest governance risk and the biggest strategic opportunity in the enterprise,' said Ramprakash Ramamoorthy, director of AI research at ManageEngine. 'Organizations that will thrive are those that address the security threats and reframe shadow AI as a strategic indicator of genuine business needs. IT leaders must shift from playing defense to proactively building transparent, collaborative, and secure AI ecosystems that employees feel empowered to use.' Identifying the Shadow AI Gaps To turn the use of shadow AI from a liability into a strategic advantage, IT leaders need to close the gaps in education, visibility, and governance revealed by the report. Specifically, a lack of education around AI model training, safe user behavior, and organizational impact is driving systematic misuse. Blind spots continue to grow in organizations, even as IT teams move to approve and integrate AI tools as quickly as possible. Meanwhile, shadow AI proliferates due to inadequate enforcement of established governance policies. 85% of ITDMs report that employees are adopting AI tools faster than their IT teams can assess them. 32% of employees entered confidential client data into AI tools without confirming company approval, while 37% entered private, internal company data. 53% of ITDMs say employees' use of personal devices for work-related AI tasks is creating a blind spot in their organization's security posture. Only 54% of ITDMs report their organizations have implemented clear, enforced AI governance policies and actively monitor for unauthorized use, while 91% have implemented policies overall. Pivoting to Proactive AI Management Proactively managing AI means harnessing employee initiative while maintaining security. It delivers the business value discovered in shadow AI but does so via AI tools that are approved by IT. To that end, ITDMs and employees make several strategic recommendations in the report. 63% of ITDMs advise integrating approved AI tools into standard workflows and business applications, 60% suggest implementing clear policies on acceptable AI use, and 55% suggest establishing a list of vetted and approved tools. 66% of employees recommend setting clear policies that are fair and practical, 63% recommend providing official tools that are relevant to their tasks, and 60% advise providing better education on understanding the risks. 'Shadow AI is a fatal flaw for most organizations," said Sathish Sagayaraj Joseph, regional technical head at ManageEngine. "IT teams can't manage risk they can't see—and they can't enable business value that users won't divulge. Proactive AI management unites IT and business professionals in their pursuit of common, organizational goals. That means employees are equipped to understand and avoid AI-related risks, and IT is empowered to help them use AI in ways that drive real business outcomes.' The full report, The Shadow AI Surge in Enterprises: Insights from the U.S. and Canadian Workplace, is available for download here. Survey Methodology In May 2025, ManageEngine commissioned independent market research agency Censuswide to conduct a study of 350 ITDMs and 350 working professionals across the U.S. and Canada, employed in organizations with at least 500 employees and $10M in annual revenue. The survey explored AI usage patterns, security concerns, and governance gaps, with a focus on real-world behaviors across organizations of varying sizes and industries. About ManageEngine ManageEngine is a division of Zoho Corporation and a leading provider of IT management solutions for organizations across the world. With a powerful, flexible, and AI-powered digital enterprise management platform, we help businesses get their work done from anywhere and everywhere—better, safer, and faster. To learn more, visit