Zoho’s AI Revolution: Unveiling Zia LLM and Agents for Smarter Business
In a bold stride toward redefining enterprise software, Zoho Corporation, the Chennai-based SaaS giant, launched its proprietary large language model, Zia LLM, alongside a suite of AI-powered agents at its annual Zoholics India conference in Bengaluru on July 17, 2025. This move marks a significant milestone in Zoho’s 13-year AI journey, emphasizing privacy, efficiency, and cost optimization. With India as its fastest-growing market, Zoho’s latest offerings are poised to transform how businesses leverage AI, particularly in a region where digital adoption is skyrocketing. This article delves into Zia LLM’s unique features, its impact on the SaaS landscape, and why Zoho’s approach could reshape enterprise AI globally.
Zia LLM: A Tailored AI for Business Needs
Unlike general-purpose models such as ChatGPT, Zia LLM has been specifically designed to be enterprise-ready to address enterprise use cases and run models to extract structured data, summarize and generate data via retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and build code. An in-house developed solution based on the AI-accelerated computing platform provided by NVIDIA, Zia LLM will be offered in three variants: 1.3, 2.6, and 7 billion parameters, with each of them optimized to perform different workloads to achieve the right balance between performance and resource efficiency. According to Mani Vembu, the CEO who coined the term, this so-called right-sizing strategy would guarantee businesses access to potent AI without the need to pay up in terms of computational expenses, which is especially important in India (and other countries) with its small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
Zia LLM is differentiated by the ability of Zoho to keep data confidential. The model will also safeguard customer data so that it remains within Zoho’s ecosystem of data centers in the US, India, and Europe, thus answering questions of privacy-sensitive industries such as those in the finance and healthcare sectors. A report provided by Gartner in 2023 states that 70 percent of organizations choose data sovereignty as a priority during the adoption of AI, which makes a self-hosting model an interesting competitive advantage of Zoho. The fact that the company has chosen to train Zia LLM using publicly accessible and proprietarily labeled data instead of customer data is also part of its privacy-first culture.
Zia Agents: Digital Employees for Every Workflow
Adding to the Zia LLM, Zoho presented more than 25 pre-constructed Zia Agents, which are considered to be digital employees able to simplify activities in sales, HR, customer care, and so on. They are the agents that are part of 55+ application packages integrated into Zoho, and they are all about automation of repetitive actions such as care of emailing, examination of sales deals, and job candidates. Zoho provides special agents to carry out KYC procedures to check documents such as PAN cards, GSTIN, and voter IDs to meet the local requirements of the Indian businesses. As in a 2024 NASSCOM report, the SaaS market in India is estimated to grow to a $50 billion market by 2030, and AI-powered automation is one of the major boosters, and the agents of Zoho can also jump in this market.
A no-code platform, the Zia Agent Studio enables businesses to build their own custom agents without code. It allows users to configure agents to workflows using a drag-and-drop interface since Zoho has more than 700 built-in actions in its ecosystem. Another innovation is the Agent Marketplace, where developers and partners can publish and earn income using custom agents, promoting a collaborative AI ecosystem. This decentralization of AI growth is in tandem with the Indian drive towards digital innovation that is inclusive, as demonstrated by the India AI Mission, which is to ensure that AI is available to all industries.
Cost Efficiency and Market Disruption
The leadership at Zoho perceives AI as a force behind the profound transformation of the SaaS industry. CEO Mani Vembu warns that the prices of SaaS products will tumble down by 50 percent because of the oversupply of AI-based software, which is being driven by the fast development cycle. The SaaS players have attempted to use AI to push up pricing, but according to Vembu, we should see price decreases on software. The strategy of Zoho not to have extra fees on Zia LLM and agents, which offset the costs internally at its own data centers and GPUs, develops a new norm of value-oriented SaaS. This strategy is met well in India, where price is a dominant factor, with 80 percent of SMEs in the country mentioning costs as a hindrance to technology adoption, according to a 2024 FICCI report.
Zoho is keen on efficiency not only in terms of its infrastructure. The fact that Zoho has its own data center and is supported by renewable energy means that it does not have to pay as much to use a public cloud, which is transferred to the customers. This goes hand in hand with its 32 percent year-to-year increase in India during 2024, which is on the back of trendy products such as Zoho One, CRM Plus, and Zoho People. India is the most diverse country in the world, with a beautiful mix of various resources, cultures, and people. Considering such a diverse land as India, with its 10-year CAGR of 51%, Zoho is a company that is committed to affordability and innovation, which fits within the SaaS ecosystem in India.
Local Context and Global Vision
The special needs of India are at the foundation of Zoho’s AI strategy. Available in both its Hindi and English speech-to-text models, which have 75% superior performance compared to industry standards, they address linguistic diversity in India, and it is also expected to cover additional Indian and European languages in the next four years. GL-Lite-friendly models will work perfectly in the mobile-first economy of India, where 9 out of 10 IU avail IUs through smartphones, as another IAMAI report shows, in 2024. With affordable Indic language capabilities and KYC-savvy agents, Zoho helps resolve local pain points, including regulatory compliance requirements and accessibility, making it a one-stop solution for Indian enterprises.
Zoho is trying to compete with companies such as Microsoft and Salesforce globally by providing alternatives at a price and with a decision to give an option to keep the data to oneself. Third-party agents have access to Zoho APIs through the support of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) server with their own access rights that do not violate the user permission, leading to interoperability. Zoho has more than 850,000 customers and a current valuation of more than 11 billion, which makes its investment in AI of a value of 20 million in 2024 and onwards a bet on the long-term future of vertical AI in such industries as BFSI and manufacturing.
The Road Ahead
The roadmap that Zoho has planned is the improvement of the parameters that Zia LLM has, adding a Reasoning Language Model (RLM), and optimizing Ask Zia to have finance and support team skills. The seamless workflow will be further simplified by the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol that will allow agents to collaborate easily. As Vembu warns that AI is a tool of productivity magnification as opposed to a human substitution, one cannot argue with its impressions. Increases in productivity, especially more tickets being worked by support agents, featured in the reports of early adopters, with a 2025 McKinsey report estimating a possible annual increase of global productivity by 0.6% in the use of AI.
The introduction of Zia LLM and agents by Zoho is a game changer for those businesses that want to use effective and privacy-oriented AI. Focused on affordability, location relevance, and enterprise-level capabilities, Zoho is not only keeping pace in the AI race, but it is also redefining it in India and the rest of the world.
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