News Highlights:
- Zoho Corporation is enhancing its AI offerings with the launch of Zia Agents, Agent Studio, and the Agent Marketplace.
- The Zia Agent Studio provides no-code and low-code options for users to create customized autonomous agents with built-in skills.
Zoho Corporation, a leading global technology company, is broadening the capabilities of Zia with the introduction of Zia Agents, Agent Studio, and Agent Marketplace, reports Digital TimesNG.
These innovations allow businesses to access, create, and distribute intelligent, autonomous digital agents throughout their organizations.
Starting today, Zoho and ManageEngine will offer a preview of pre-built, task-specific Zia Agents, which will be deployed across Zoho Corporation’s extensive portfolio of over 100 products in the upcoming weeks.
“The speed of disruption and quality of innovation we’re seeing in our industry right now has encouraged me to focus on my passion area, technology. I will devote more time to hands-on technical work for the company, spearheading several deep R&D initiatives, beginning with AI,” said Sridhar Vembu, Zoho Corporation’s Co-founder and Chief Scientist.
“Utilising Zoho’s deep engineering expertise, its own data centres, and shared data model, we will develop powerful and usable solutions that drive customer value while retaining our commitment to customer flexibility and data privacy.”
Zoho Corporation’s in-house AI has evolved over the past decade from proactive to prescriptive to generative to agentic:
Zia: Launched in 2015, Zia is Zoho Corporation’s foundational AI, facilitating all intelligent and contextual actions across the company’s ecosystem of apps. Zia possesses a vast and diverse skillset. New skills are being implemented regularly to boost customer experience and drive productivity.
Ask Zia: Launched in 2018, Ask Zia has developed into a system-wide conversational assistant that helps employees work smarter and accomplish tasks more effectively. For example, an account manager can review a report of customers at risk of churn, summarise the outcomes of each customer’s recent interactions, filter and summarise helpdesk tickets, analyse trends in their industry, and reach out to that customer for a meeting based on the employee’s upcoming travel schedule, without leaving the Ask Zia interface. Ask Zia is powered by Zoho’s unified data platform and will be contextually embedded across all applications.
Zia Agents: Today, Zoho Corporation has previewed some of the several dozens of pre-built Zia Agents that will be rolled out in the coming months, including an Account Manager Agent, SDR Agent, HR Agent, Customer Support Agent, IT Help Desk Agent, and a SalesCoach Agent. For customers, partners, and developers looking to create their own agents, Zoho is launching Zia Agent Studio, allowing them to build and deploy customised agents with inherited skillsets, which can then be distributed through Zoho’s Agent Marketplace.
- Zia Agent Studio: Offering no-code and low-code experiences, Zia Agent Studio enables users to build autonomous agents with skills relevant to their specific needs. Zia Agent Studio users can also access a wide range of pre-existing Zia Skills, tools from across the Zoho ecosystem, data from a unified data platform, and a range of language models. These can be agents within a function (like an SDR agent or email support agent) or natively cross-functional agents (like an RFP agent or loan approval agent). They can be deployed on any Zoho application and summoned using Ask Zia. Moving forward, Zia Agents will be deployable in any third-party application as well. Additionally, Zia Agents with complementary skillsets can be combined using Zia Agent Studio, creating a single agent capable of cross-functional work.
- Agent Marketplace: Agents created using Zia Agent Studio can be published in the Agent Marketplace. Zoho Corporation will offer a pre-built roster of agents, while the company’s ecosystem of partners and developers can build and distribute specialised AI agents through the marketplace, which can be reused and instantly deployed by organisations.
Organisational Differentiation
Today’s announcement follows record growth for Zoho Corporation, which onboarded 110,000 new customers globally in 2024. With over 850,000 customers globally in diverse industries, using a range of tools across Zoho and ManageEngine, Zoho Corporation’s AI solutions are informed by a vast range of functional data. This is a core differentiator for the company, putting it in a unique position to serve businesses with cutting-edge technology.
Technological Differentiation
Zoho Corporation’s distinct technological breadth and depth is a fundamental differentiator, particularly in AI development and deployment. Leveraging its shared data model, owned and managed tech stack, including global data centres, and a broad application portfolio, Zoho Corporation’s highly secure, privacy-compliant, usable, capable, and deeply knowledgeable AI agents deliver superior technology at a high value to its growing customer base.
Availability
These capabilities will begin to roll out to a limited set of customers, which will expand monthly.
