BrainBlog for Zoho by Jason Bloomberg
Zoho is no stranger to AI.
It first launched its foundational AI Zia in 2015, facilitating contextual actions across its portfolio of applications.
In 2018, it augmented Zia, developing it into a system-wide conversational assistant.
Now in 2025, Zoho is throwing its hat into the exploding agentic AI ring with Zia Agents by delivering several pre-built agents as well as a studio tool for building custom agents.
Zoho’s most important differentiators in the agentic AI marketplace, however, are its multi-agent platform and its uncompromising support for privacy.
Driving Innovation in AI
Zoho is never content to rest on its laurels in any product category it competes in – and AI is no different. “In the last year, things have changed dramatically, particularly with the evolution of agentic AI,” explained Raju Vegesna, chief evangelist at Zoho. “We are launching our own platform for customers to build their own agents. Large language models (LLMs) have come into the technology world. And now, agentic AI brings in a new ingredient.”
Zoho’s pre-built AI agents work with several of its existing applications. Coming over the next few months: an account manager agent, HR agent, customer support agent, help desk agent, and many others.
When customers want to build their own agents, they can use Zoho’s new Zia Agent Studio, which offers both no-code and low-code approaches to building agents.
Building Applications with AI
These low-code/no-code capabilities align with Zoho Creator, which now has generative AI (genAI) capabilities built in. “We have a very good low-code/no-code platform called Creator. We have over 5 million applications created on the platform,” Vegesna continued. “Now we are using the LLM to make it easy for anyone to create applications. You input details on what kind of application you want and say ‘generate an application.’ It can generate the app for you.”
Such prompt-based app generation works in some situations, but it’s not for everyone – and that’s fine with Zoho. “Zoho offers tools for no-code, tools for low-code, and tools for pro-code as well across the spectrum. And then there are tools that extend the ecosystem and the applications and integrate the applications.”
According to Vegesna, Zoho has aimed genAI-driven application creation at novice users, who can use the capability to create advanced functionality.
Novice users can even use this genAI capability to automatically generate SQL queries for interacting with data in databases. More advanced application creators can use Deluge, Zoho’s own programming language, and host the applications on Catalyst, Zoho’s serverless platform.
For customers that want to use multiple models – say, a mix of public and private models or perhaps a mix of LLMs and small language models – Zoho is now offering an AI bridge that can connect a range of different models, whether on-premises, in the cloud, and over the Internet.
Also in the works: an ‘image to app’ agent that can take an image of an application interface (say, from a web design tool) and generate a working application from the image.
Redoubled Focus on Privacy
Zoho has always championed privacy, as it’s responsible for keeping customer data confidential across its many applications.
Given public LLMs’ predilection for leveraging public data, privacy and confidentiality are now of particular concern to users of genAI.
To maintain this privacy and confidentiality, Zoho offers a mandatory permission layer with risk-based authentication, intelligent threat detection and response, identity-first authentication of AI agents, as well as self-service agents for IAM workflows like password reset and account unlock.
Zoho’s Platform Play
The company is leveraging its new agentic AI capabilities to deliver a ‘multi-agent platform’ that positions the Zoho application suite as more of a platform than a collection of applications.
Zoho’s applications have always benefited from a single underlying platform, unifying the data model across the various apps while running them in Zoho’s own data centers.
By positioning this platform within the context of agentic AI, Zoho is moving its platform story upmarket, focusing more on enterprise requirements.
Compared to Zoho’s traditional small and midsized business customer base, enterprises are more likely to have many thousands of users running dozens of Zoho applications, with enterprise-level concerns about security, data privacy, and regulatory compliance.
The Intellyx Take
With the help of agentic AI, Zoho is now positioning its platform as aligning with enterprise concerns – without diminishing its value proposition to the smaller customers who have always been its bread and butter.
Yet, despite its 850,000 customers and 100 million users across all industries and geographies, Zoho remains poorly known among enterprise decision makers.
The company’s strategic moves in 2025 are turning the situation around. The combination of its platform story, its leadership in the AI space, and its commitment to privacy and data confidentiality are winning enterprise customers around the world.
Copyright © Intellyx BV. Zoho is an Intellyx customer. Intellyx retains final editorial control of this article. No AI was used to write this article.
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