SiliconANGLE article by Jason English
The application platform provider Zoho Corp. highlighted its presence within larger enterprises last week at the analyst-only ZohoDay25 summit in a remote location an hour from Austin in the Texas Hill Country, announcing a novel lightweight approach to agentic AI that mirrors Zoho’s flexible organizational structure and globally distributed user base.
As explained in my previous coverage of last year’s ZohoDay, no other technology company operates like Zoho. In a world of vendor consolidation, volatile valuations and equity capitalization, it has been able to play the long game, investing in a common infrastructure and application experience while growing talent in local economies around the world.
You would think that Chief Executive Sridhar Vembu stepping down to focus on research and development as chief scientist, in order for co-founder Shailesh Kumar Davey to take over as Zoho CEO, would be the biggest news coming out of the show. But all indications are that these management rotations won’t affect the constant flow of new products and larger enterprise customer wins.
Bringing agentic AI into trusted context
Vembu, back on stage as chief scientist, came out of the gate stating, “OpenAI is a mirage” and introducing its unique multi-agent autonomous AI approach that validates a leaner, more focused form of AI. This release seems like a harbinger for the disruptive open-source DeepSeek AI project out of China. “If Big Tech will own AI, then everyone else pays tribute,” Vembu said.
Zoho has been pioneering its own AI approach for several years, progressing from its early Zia assistant chatbots to a very sophisticated framework behind customer queries that can orchestrate their own specialized models alongside other self-hosted and large language models through an intelligent-assistant bridge.
It also introduced Zia Agent Studio, a no-code way for any Zoho customer to create agents…
Read the full event recap article on SiliconANGLE here: https://siliconangle.com/2025/02/12/enterprise-sized-implementations-bite-sized-ai-agents-zohoday25/
