Video Interview for Zoho by Jason Bloomberg
At #ZohoDay 2026 with Mani Vembu, CEO, Zoho. Intellyx analyst Jason Bloomberg interviews Mani on Zoho’s 30th anniversary about their new AppOS approach spanning developer and low-code application development, the future of the #SaaS space and #AI-based platforms, #abstraction layers and more.
Watch the interview video below or visit our YouTube page at: https://youtu.be/Z4xVDk180ls
Full transcript of the interview:
Jason Bloomberg
Hi, this is Jason Bloomberg with Intellyx. Please introduce yourself.
Mani Vembu (00:13)
I’m Mani Vembu. I’m the CEO of Zoho Division.
Bloomberg (00:17)
Very good. So today we’re talking about AppOS, which is a new Zoho announcement. So give us a bit of background on AppOS. What is it and how did you come up with it?
Vembu (00:27)
So see, AppOS is, we call it the foundational platform for building the business apps. So we have 30 years of experience building, say, apps across multiple domains, like CRM, ITSM, HR, financial applications, ERP, and all those applications. So we believe that there is a good layer of abstraction that can be done across how the data is stored, how the workflows are executed, how the processes are being built, and in terms of reporting everything. And so if an abstracted layer is being offered for businesses to build applications, it could be accelerate the application development. And also with the new generation of AI tools, it also can minimize the whole development cycle. So that’s why we want to build AppOS, which is very specific for building business applications.
Bloomberg (01:17)
What is different about AppOS from what Zoho was doing before? You already had a platform for business applications with quite a number of applications and a common data model and common underlying infrastructure. There’s already a platform approach to what Zoho was doing. What’s new and different about AppOS?
Vembu (01:36)
See, so far, what we have done is we have a cloud infrastructure layer where each application will start at a little lower level in terms of rates. We abstracted certain levels of infrastructure across our apps. In the apps, we opened up some platform functionalities. For example, in the apps, we allow people to add their own custom modules, their own widgets, their own rates, say bringing their own custom processes. Those are all the customizations that we allow on top of our apps. That means, say, you can write your own code, which is custom function contextual. It is all I would say the contextual opening of platform functionalities. But what we are now doing is, say, from these apps, we took what is common across all these apps and tried to offer it as AppOS so that new apps can be built on top of it. Our own new apps, new apps we want to build on top of it, and the same we want to open for our customers and partners and other developers. That means we are standardizing on what we are building and what customers can build on. Rather than, say, we built on one platform which has much more flexibility for our developers, and then we only open contextual platform functionality for customers. Now we are going to open, say, the underlying layer, which is much more abstracted. That way, the customers don’t have to do the same work that we have done already.
Bloomberg (03:01)
So Zoho has offered Zoho Creator, a low-code tool for a number of years, Zoho Catalyst, more for focusing on enterprise integration. So you already supported the ability for customers to build custom apps. So I’m still a little unclear as to what’s changed with regard to building custom apps or custom integrations that you couldn’t do in Creator or Catalyst already.
Vembu (03:24)
So definitely you can do, right? Say, for example, you can look at, say, Creator as the highest end of abstraction. That means we abstracted almost until the UI layer and customers just have to say that. That means if you abstract at that level, then the flexibility drops. Then if you take the Catalyst on the other end, we opened up the infrastructure for developers. That means we opened up the DB, we opened up the writing custom functions, so we opened up memory, we opened up queue, so all the components of software stack. That means it is serverless. The value there is serverless. Customers don’t have to buy servers. That means, say at one side, it is a little abstraction, but a lot of flexibility to build the apps. On the other side in Creator, it is highly abstracted, not so flexible. That means it is meant for certain types of apps here, certain types of apps here. So AppOS fits exactly in the middle. That means we abstract it to a degree where developers don’t feel the lack of flexibility. We also give the flexibility of building their own custom UIs, custom clients, and all the other stuff. Because every app don’t have to follow the same a UI. That means they could actually build their own custom clients, say, the experience can be very different and building agents can be very different. That way, if you look at between the Catalyst and Creator, if you have an X axis, Y axis, where we talk about flexibility and say, complexity. Maybe AppOS sits on highly complex but more flexible. Creator fix on very easy, but a little less flexible. AppOS will be right in the middle where it offers the flexibility at the same time, it also abstracts whatever should be abstracted. So that’s how I would put it. And then even whatever you are now building, so what we are doing now is any app you build on Creator, that it will also actually deployed in AppOS only. So that means it will automatically use all the AppOS components and it deploys in the AppOS. That means it sits with all the other apps. And Creator will become the hosting environment for AppOS. As I showed in the demo, when you build an app, because the app is only the front-end, the application site. So the DB is actually in the AppOS. So that means when you build the app, you need a hosting environment. So Catalyst will become the hosting environment for the app.
Bloomberg (05:59)
So for a customer who’s already been building custom apps or customizations in Zoho, how difficult is it to move to AppOS? I mean, are they going to want to move from the existing platform to AppOS? And if so, what is involved in making that move?
Vembu (06:16)
This will be very seamless. That means for customers, they may not even know that because AppOS is going to actually be part of every app. That means every app moves into AppOS. That means it is going to only give much more flexibility for the app. So that means they could do more customization and all the tools remain the same. So that means whatever we have given the low-code tools, the experience of low-code tools are not going to change. That means our process builder called Blueprint will remain the same. Our Module Builder will remain the same. Our Workflow Builder will remain the same. So all those low-code tools will automatically work with AppOS. So that means there is no migration for the customer. We are only migrating our own apps and our own, right? Say, to use the same two components rather than… Because if you look at the current ecosystem where since we opened up at the infrastructure level, not abstract at certain levels. So some of these features will be implemented differently across different apps. Now we are unifying them. So making sure that AppOS has a consistent experience across these functionalities. And that means, say, for the customer, it will be very easy. And for the end customer, they may not even know that these apps are getting migrated because the data migration, app migration, the customizability, everything will be seamless and unified.
Bloomberg (07:31)
Of course, no discussion today would be complete without talking about AI, of course. But I wanted to drill down a bit and to assume specifics here. One is building AI agents and the other is vibe coding. Both of these are very, very hyped up trends today. But let’s start with agents. What’s the AppOS story for AI agents? Can customers build agents? Are they leveraging agents within the Zoho platform or both? Then what do they do with the agents?
Vembu (08:01)
For AI agents, we already launched the Agent Studio, where customers can start to build agents. We also give ourselves a lot of native agents, but customers also can start to build agents. Already, our customers started to use the Agent Builder to build, Agent Studio to build the agents. And within AppOS, for the developers, this will also be available as part of the stack. That means if you are building an app and your app has to have some native agents, then you can actually build those native agents as part of the apps itself. And then every application, because our Agent Studio already works with all the apps. So any custom app or anything, any app you build on it, so it will be like Agent Studio native. That means Agent Studio understands it because it’s all part of the same stack. So that’s the story with building agents and deploying agents. Then on the vibe coding part, so as you can see, we are opening this at two levels. One is through MCP for the AI codegen IDEs because that’s what many developers are already using. So we want to be supporting the ecosystem there. And we will also give our own ID. So completely, you can prompt-based development will give, where you could actually use that to generate. So we give the choice to the customers. If they are already using an IDE, then we will plug in AppOS into that. If they are not using it, they can use ours.
Bloomberg (09:27)
Okay, so you mentioned prompt-based development, which is at the core of what we mean by vibe coding these days. When you think about prompt-based development, on the one hand, you have somebody verbally describing what they want an application to do, and then the platform builds it. But you may also feed in a pre-written requirements document, and then that is more specific in terms of what the application, what the platform can build. But in the demo you showed this morning, you showed some Cursor as well. It’s a third-party tool for… It’s basically a command-line tool for vibe coding. I didn’t quite understand from your demo how Cursor fit into the Zoho story and why there wasn’t just a Zoho tool that did the same thing. Why did you have Cursor in the demo?
Vembu (10:14)
Yeah, see, already we have the tool. In the UI itself, the tool is there. We already have a demo also for that, the same application built-in thing, our own vibe coding. And prompt-driven development. But we just want to show, say, how it is developer friendly, where if the developers are already using an IDE, so they can still use back-end AppOS as their target and then generate code for AppOS. So through MCP, we connect there and then allow customers, developers to generate code. And then the whole idea is the way we are looking at this, we want, because there is business and IT in any organization, where business drives the requirements and IT drives the execution. So how we want to change this with, say, in the AI world is, say, we want business to still own the requirements, but business have to make sure the requirements are given as document. Then our tool will take this document, generate it as a technical spec. Say, for example, you already have certain modules in CRM and this new process requires some more new modules, and with some relationships, it will automatically put those. We will do that agent orchestration there and then we will put those. And then it will show to the IT, the CRM administrator, whether this is what they want to do based on the requirement. And if they are okay with it, then we will generate these as tasks and then ask them any ID. It could be third-party ID or it could be our own ID to generate this customization as part of the platform. So then that means from requirements to the production. So that means pre-production, where you can do this and host it in a sandbox and then have your business do the UAT. During the UAT, you will find out some changes. You can do the change management through the same cycle, and then finally it goes to production. That means, right? We want to take the AI through the whole SDLC process where there is a human in the loop, but the human is not doing the heavy lifting, whereas the AI is doing the heavy lifting and human is only verifying and reviewing and making sure that the changes are done right. So this is the process we want to achieve with the human and the AI working together.
Bloomberg (12:33)
It makes sense. So I have one final question, and this is the bigger picture question in terms of the economics of SaaS-based business applications and how AI is changing the overall economics. This came up this morning as well, that it’s applying downward pricing pressure, it’s constraining margins. What we’re seeing as analysts is also we’re seeing a whole range of different startups, just brand new companies. They’ve only been around for a few months saying that they can use the agentic AI to create a bunch of business applications that are all pre-integrated. It sounds like, wow, all this work that Zoho put in to build Zoho One over the years, and now along comes a two-month-old startup, and they can do it with AI and build something equivalent. I don’t believe it. I don’t believe you can build a Zoho One in two months, but that’s what they’re saying. Clearly, that is going to apply pricing pressure on Zoho and other business competitive constraints. How does Zoho, especially talking about AppOS, how is Zoho leveraging AppOS to combat the dozens of AI-based startups who are trying to tell similar stories to what Zoho’s story has been for a number of years now?
Vembu (13:50)
Yeah, so the challenge is, say, first you need to understand the domain or the vertical value are in. So that means to even give the prompt, you have to know what is the prompt, what is the requirements. So that means that’s going to actually take some time. And even if we assume that there is a domain expertise who is doing that. When that means the domain expertise is only in that particular domain. So if a bunch of domain experts do it for their own domain, it’s all going to be again a silo. That means so built on the cloud infrastructure, everything is safe from scratch. So It all comes with its own challenges of integrating and all those. That’s why we are now fixing the foundational layer, where we want to give a solid foundation for business apps. Then we also want to increase these developers who are trying to build apps to get on to this foundation. They already get the foundation clear. The foundation has the IAM, the messaging, all the components, the workflows, the processes, everything, the governance, the permission layer, everything is for the business. We already have millions of customers and then so many users. Then it instantly gives a market for these developers. That’s how we see the ecosystem play. When the barrier to entry is low. There is also a challenge of, let’s say, each one creating their own islands. It’s going to… Because the compliance is a challenge now, and every vendor cannot invest in compliance. That’s where this a consolidated framework and platforms will play a bigger role. That’s what we are seeing as from moving from apps to a platform will have a tremendous value in the future.
Bloomberg (15:35)
Very good. Well, that’s all my questions. I think we’re out of time. Thank you very much. Really appreciate it.
Vembu (15:39)
Thank you, Jason. Thanks for your time. Thank you.
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