Together, these solutions empower enterprises to access, build, and distribute intelligent, autonomous digital agents across their organisations.

Beginning today, Zoho and ManageEngine will be previewing pre-built, task-specific Zia Agents, which will deploy across Zoho Corporation’s combined portfolio of 100+ products in the coming 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.

‘Do more with Zoho’ is not a mere coinage rather a reality. With 55+ secure and reliable business applications that help you grow your business, in fact, you can build the whole of your business operations and processes on Zoho.

Kehinde Ogundare, the County Manager of Zoho Corporation (Nigeria), made these remarks last week during a chat with ICT editors at the Company’s Lekki office in Lagos.

Zoho brand, Zoho’s products and Zoho’s priorities for the Nigerian market

He reiterated that the business world is constantly evolving, and every organization is trying to keep up hence Zoho has prepared itself for value addition to these businesses.

Earlier this month, Zoho Corporation hit a 100 million user-milestone across the globe.

Now a full-stack technology company as it evolved from a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering, Zoho became the first bootstrapped company to hit this milestone.

This growth is also coming from the offshoot of the company, reaching 1 billion USD in annual revenue in 2022.

“It is simple; we make technology work for you as an individual or business. And that is our commitment”, Ogundare said.

For more than two decades, Zoho, founded by Sridhar Vembu, has grown steadily without external funding, and this has allowed the tech company to preserve its long-term vision and culture without outside pressure or influence.

Serving more than 150 countries, the tech company boasts over 15,000 employees globally in its connected ecosystem.

According to Ogundare, Zoho which is now a full-stack technology company enables users to run their entire operation on the company’s platform, offering services such as website building, finance, human resources, sales and marketing, project management and related services.

“We provide a platform such that your departments don’t work in silos. Zoho platform is now a connected ecosystem.”

As explained by Ogundare, the company in 2005 started with two products, Writer and CRM, hitting its first 1 million client base in 2008.

In seven years, the company added 14 million users to reach the 15 million mark in 2015. The growth became gradual till the present 100 million users.

“This is to show you that people actually get to trust us and with the credibility we have built over the years, people keep coming back, recommending Zoho to their connections”

On the recent data protection law signed into a bill in Nigeria, Ogundare reiterated that Zoho stands for privacy and security, “When you think of any top tech company today in terms of privacy, Zoho comes top. All our products are privacy and security-focused, we are NDPR and GDPR compliant, so this new law is a welcome development.”

Ogundare, however, mentioned that the government needs to do better when it comes to orientation, as a lot of people know nothing about data privacy.

“You can’t just enact a law without a follow-up. You need to let businesses know how crucial the customer data they are keeping and the implication of a data breach”

Ogundare further emphasized that it’s a good initiative, however, the government needs to do more awareness and create more orientation, partnering with private sectors and communities to give people that important information for them to secure data and abide by the data privacy law.

Zoho has also integrated tech stack and this is why the company guarantees data privacy and anti-theft activities.

“We don’t show ads, we don’t track you, these are the things customers want to know, feeling secured that their data is safe”

According to Ogundare, in 2020 the tech company removed all 3rd party trackers from all its products.

More packages for Startups and MSMEs

Ogundare listed Zoho for Startups, Zoho Empower and Enterprise Business Solutions, as three of the company’s focused activities for businesses, especially in Nigeria.

The initiatives help startups that are part of an incubator or accelerator by offering them wallet credits, workshops and more.

“A lot of founders spend too much money on technology, Zoho for startup is an initiative that we created to help emerging startups kick-start their progress.”

As explained by Ogundare, Zoho has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with StartupSouth in Nigeria to offer N500K wallet credit for startups. This credit will be used to test and deploy any of its products.

“We are not just focusing on big businesses, we are looking at the small business as well, what can we do? How can we give you orientation? How can you streamline your business, how can you digitalize, Zoho for startups wants to offer a better approach.”

“Zoho for startups empower businesses in leveraging tech to kick-start. We Orgnise workshops and training for them on how to use the credits on how to use the software to scale up, optimize and automate their operations.”

Zoho Empower aims to build digital literacy in MSMEs, helping them to overcome resistance to tech and digitally transforming their businesses through skill development, and technology counselling, while creating a marketplace for them.

According to Kehinde, Zoho has also partnered with a commercial bank (the financial institution that offers loans to women entrepreneurs in its large SME community) to bring its products to these entrepreneurs at a discounted rate or for free.

Zoho Workplace

Enterprise Business Solutions is an end-to-end software implementation and project management service dedicated to helping mid-to-large-sized companies deploy the best solutions to optimize their business processes.

Speaking about Zoho Workplace, the platform has 16 million users globally and in 2021, it experienced a 34% year-on-year growth with more than 40% of the new migrations coming from two major big tech platforms.

Ogundare further revealed that the SMB customer base increased by 40%, mid-size surged by 36% and enterprises expanded by more than 20%.

With the rise of low-code platforms, users can leverage the Zoho Creator platform to build websites seamlessly for their businesses.

Kehinde Ogundare extolled the leadership of Zoho for the employee culture and prioritizing the welfare of its staff globally with exceptional experience.

“Putting employee and customer experience together makes a company grow faster”

“Zoho is unified and integrated, allowing you to scale. If you start small with us you can expand with it, our platform has the capacity to allow you scale as you grow”

“The more people understand the value it is bringing to their business, the more we are expanding to meet their needs” Ogundare added.

He further assured that Zoho Nigeria (office) located at 2B Bayo Olagoke Close, Admiralty Road, Lekki Phase 1, demonstrates the company’s believe and commitment to growing Nigeria’s economy.

Zoho Corporation, a leading global technology company, today announced investments across its entire portfolio to accelerate upmarket momentum.

The company has witnessed a three-year CAGR of 65% in mid-market and enterprise segments, which now represents one-third of the entire business.

The company now boasts more than 90 million users across more than 600,000 global businesses of all sizes.

“With our strong DNA as a technology platform company, we have been able to steadily improve our maturity and readiness for large organisations by investing in adjacent areas,” said Kehinde Ogundare, Country Manager, Zoho Nigeria. “Our humble roots in SMB have helped us systematically build powerful software with strong everyday usability. Across our products, extensibility, usability, packaging, and go-to-market approach, Zoho aims to be the simplest enterprise software vendor in the market. Today’s announcement serves as a testament to that goal, helping our customers adopt more of our software, add new capabilities, extend our platform to suit their granular workflows, and get ready for the future. Whether customers buy our software for one department or the entire organisation, one workflow or a collection of customer journeys, the experience with Zoho will be far simpler than with any other large vendor.”

Zoho is also witnessing a steady upmarket growth across the Middle East and Africa region, the digital technology and creative industries possess immense potential to generate employment opportunities and stimulate economic growth within Nigeria.

The company today opened its seventh office in the region in Nairobi, Kenya. The company is also investing in go-to-market services, new products, platform extensibility, privacy and security to improve the customer experience and enable success.

Go-to-market Investments

Enterprise Business Solutions: Zoho aims to expand EBS across skills, industry depth, and regional presence to help enterprise businesses manage their technology stack better in today’s economic climate. EBS provides expertise to large organisations across solutions engineering, account management, and customer success.

New SI Partnerships: Zoho will strengthen its network of SI (system integrators) partners to enhance its platform, create industry-specific solutions, and develop customer best practices. Currently, Zoho’s SI partners include Tata Consultancy Services, Deloitte and Wipro.

Global Procurement: Zoho accepts payment in over 15 currencies worldwide, facilitating global procurement efforts for enterprise organisations with regional operations through unified multi-currency invoicing.

Platform Investments

Marketplace Expansion: Zoho Marketplace offers over 1,800 extensions and has surpassed 1 million installations, and receives over 30,000 new monthly installations.

Large organisations can create private extensions to address workflow nuances and deploy them through the Marketplace. Partners have been trained and certified to provide extensibility skills.

No-code and Low-code Extensibility: Zoho’s no-code and low-code capabilities simplify large deployments, enabling faster time-to-market and lower overhead costs.

From UX design to workflow orchestration and custom applications, Zoho’s low code capabilities support every stage of deployment.

New Applications and Enhancements

Contract Management Software: Introducing Zoho Contracts, a secure solution that centralizes contract management, including authoring, approval, negotiations, and signatures. With full visibility and AI-powered automation, Zoho Contracts simplifies the complex process, mitigating risks and improving governance for large organisations, driving new business and growth.

Data Transformation for CX: Zoho DataPrep is now deeply integrated with Zoho CRM, enabling users to transform, cleanse, and format customer data within their CRM system. This integration simplifies data migration, eliminates duplicates, and validates information, making the process more efficient and precise.

Security and Privacy Investments

Identity & Authentication: Introducing Zoho OneAuth, a comprehensive, multi-factor authentication application, which now includes Smart SignIn and Passkey Support, enabling automated cross-device user login and account access assistance.

Directory Management: Zoho Directory is a secure platform for workforce identity and access management supporting 250+ pre-built integrations. Zoho Directory’s Authentication and SignOn module has been proven with over 100 million users from Zoho and ManageEngine, serving the needs of multinational enterprises including Disney, AT&T, and Sony.

Zoho Corporation, a leading global technology company, today announced execution plans and ongoing investment in AI, beginning with the launch of 13 generative AI Zoho application extensions and integrations, powered by ChatGPT.

Zoho’s developing AI strategy includes platform expansion and its innovation roadmap with a focus on delivering superior customer experience and value while ensuring the highest level of customer privacy and security.

Over a decade, Zoho has been executing and implementing AI (Zia) across its product portfolio, developing in-house technology that runs on the company’s private cloud.

“The fusion of ChatGPT’s generative AI with our homegrown AI features will provide users with a more intuitive, efficient, and secure experience, reflecting Zoho’s deep R&D-first culture,” said Kehinde Ogundare Country Manager, Zoho Nigeria.

“As a technology partner, Zoho’s customers continue to rely on us for keeping them ahead of the curve while retaining core tenets like privacy, which they have come to respect. We will continue to deliver on this promise without compromise”, added Ogundare.

The following are the three core tenets of Zoho’s AI strategy:

● Customer Experience: Zoho’s AI solutions deliver the context, intelligence, and efficiency necessary to produce exemplary experience. Zia is woven into the fabric of each step, be it enhancing customer records, producing documents, providing insights into processes or proactively forecasting, and preparing for user issues that might arise.

● Customer Privacy: Zoho builds its AI in-house, resulting in optimal privacy protection that effortlessly unifies with users’ greater technology ecosystems. Tools powered by Zoho’s AI extensions deliver intelligence without compromising customer data or sending information to an unverified third party.

● Customer Value: Zoho delivers multifaceted value in the form of customer productivity, ease of use, cost, relevant KPIs, and making AI widely available to a broad set of people.

AI Roadmap and Vision

In the short term, Zoho will facilitate Zia’s integration with third-party intelligence, bringing the newest technology into the company’s broad portfolio of business solutions.

As Zoho progresses, the company intends to take generative AI technology in-house, ensuring its 90 million global users benefit from intelligent experiences as well as Zoho’s leading value and privacy standards.

In addition, Zoho is currently developing proprietary Learning Language Models (LLMs) capable of conversing, summarising, paraphrasing, and adapting to new tasks with zero-shot learning techniques, empowering seamless AI-driven communication and knowledge discovery.

Generative AI in Zoho Applications

Available in its marketplace, Zoho’s new generative AI extensions, powered by ChatGPT, complement the broad portfolio of AI technology Zoho already supports.

This new technology has been contextually integrated into Zoho’s applications and can be leveraged right away by users: 

• Zoho CRM with Generative AI can extract important information from customer records, predict deal outcomes, create custom emails and templates, and check for grammatical errors.
• Zoho Analytics with Generative AI allows users to import public datasets, blend them with business data, and create SQL queries from natural language.
• Zoho Desk with Generative AI can summarise tickets, analyse customer tone, generate replies from a knowledge base, and track down solutions.
• Zoho Writer with Generative AI can suggest headlines, fix punctuation and shorten content, and integrate answers to user questions.
• Zoho Mail with Generative AI can create multiple versions of emails, highlight action items, and generate email summaries.
• Zoho Cliq with Generative AI can paraphrase messages, transform threads into outlines, and shorten responses.
• Zoho Social with Generative AI can produce engaging content, suggest relevant supporting media, and optimise posts.
• Zoho Assist with Generative AI can generate shareable summaries and enhance customer service.
• Zoho LandingPage with Generative AI can create complete product-specific landing pages with forms, personalisation, SEO optimisation, and migration capabilities.
• Zoho SalesIQ with Generative AI can transcribe conversations, tag transcripts, review messages, and utilise ChatGPT Block in Zobot.
• Zoho Notebook with Generative AI can organise notes with automatic tagging and summarising, turn them into checklists, and provide grammar and spelling suggestions with Zoho Blue Pencil.
• Zoho DataPrep with Generative AI can find external datasets and suggest relevant formulas.
• Zoho Meeting with Generative AI allows users to index session transcripts and generate effective keynotes.

Availability and Pricing  

Zia is available by default in Zoho’s applications, while ChatGPT-powered integrations are available in Zoho’s Marketplace.

Customers choosing to enable generative AI capabilities within Zoho’s applications may do so using their existing OpenAI account API key.

Based on the number of APIs used, customers will be billed directly by OpenAI. Zoho will maintain a steady rhythm announcing new generative AI extensions and integrations to its portfolio.

In addition to ongoing global expansion, the company continues to grow its product portfolio and make investments in automotive, robotics, and health care technologies. 

Zoho also celebrated opening 59 new global hub-and-spoke offices in rural areas and small cities over the last two years to expand into new markets and further support local communities.

The announcement, made at Zoho’s annual analyst summit, affirms the company’s commitment to developing resilient solutions that support all businesses, many of which have been negatively impacted by recent economic disruption.

“We’ve long felt that we have a responsibility to the communities and world around us, whether that be through providing job opportunities to those with less access or by delivering products that help businesses grow to their potential,” said Sridhar Vembu, CEO of Zoho Corporation. 

“Our approach from the start of Zoho—now 26 years ago—still rings true today: nurture people and businesses, and lower the barrier of entry. Cost-effective, yet built-for-scale products and regionally located offices aside, Zoho has built its business by being a partner that helps people thrive. Our success is their success and vice versa.”

Investments

Zoho has made strategic investments in the areas of automotive, robotics, and health care technology to support the development of and access to advanced solutions by those in need. These include: 

• An investment in Silicon Valley-based smart electric utility vehicles and powertrains manufacturer Boson, which focuses on light utility vehicles (LUVs). Boson’s initial focus is on farming, and Zoho shares that focus as it expands into rural areas across the globe.
• An investment in electric motorcycle company Ultraviolette Automotive in partnership with TVS Motor Company, an India-based motorcycle manufacturer. The combined investment totals roughly $15 million and will support the launch of a new, high-performance electric two-wheel vehicle slated for release in 2022.
• A $5 million investment in Voxelgrids, an Indian startup that builds Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanners. This is being used to foster development of deep technological capabilities and intellectual property (IP) in the country.
• Forming a consortium of local technology companies based in the Kongu region of India. Through this initiative, Zoho will make a capital investment to set up centres in the region focusing on the research and development of critical technologies for capital goods manufacturing, like machine tools, industrial automation software, and production process know-how.
• A $2.5 million investment in Genrobotics, an Indian startup building robotics and AI-powered solutions for social issues such as hazardous working conditions. Zoho’s investment will assist Genrobotics in its mission to eradicate manual scavenging in India and provide safety and dignity to workers in the sanitation and oil and gas industries. 

Innovation and R&D Diversity

Zoho’s investment and innovation philosophies are rooted in the research and development of powerful, unified tools that are customisable to any organisation’s distinct business needs and vision. 

More than 60% of the company’s workforce is devoted to engineering, both in the development of new technologies and in building ways for those apps to complement and integrate with one another. 

To date, Zoho has developed more than 55 apps, having grown from 40 only two years ago. Though the scope of offerings continues to increase, Zoho’s price does not, and Zoho remains committed to affordability—offering both free and paid versions of every product—and delivering software tailored to the distinct needs of small and medium-sized businesses.

Zoho’s Proven Growth Philosophy: Transnational Localism

Zoho continues to celebrate global expansion through its Transnational Localism effort, first introduced in early 2020 as a means to create self-reliant local communities and economies. 

Since then, the initiative has grown to include new global offices, local hiring, partnerships with local organisations and government bodies to lower the technology adoption barrier for businesses, upskilling courses in association with educational institutes, language localisation including RTL support for languages like Arabic, and local pricing for several countries. 

The offices opened as part of Zoho’s Transnational Localism efforts follow a hub-and-spoke model, with larger offices serving as hubs to several dozen small spoke offices located in rural areas and towns around the world. This method of growth allows employees to stay in their hometowns and contribute to their local community while working for a leading, globally recognised technology company.

The company improved access to both software and localised Zoho support, opening 59 hub-and-spoke offices in the last two years. In addition to aggressive expansion into new territories and markets, including Canada, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia, Zoho has announced plans to add 100 new small-scale offices in rural districts across India in the next few years.

Zoho celebrated impressive regional growth, with headcount up 300% outside of India since the start of 2020. It also aims to hire at least 2,000 employees across engineering, technology, and product development, particularly software developers, quality assessment engineers, web developers, designers, product marketers, writers, technical support engineers, and sales executives within the next year. 

We also saw movement on the legislative front, with South Africa’s Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) coming into effect in July. (Kenya and Nigeria’s equivalent acts came into effect in 2019).

In fact, Gartner predicts that modern privacy laws will cover 75% of the world’s population by the end of 2023.

But there’s also clearly still a lot of work to be done. By the end of September 2021, there had been more data breaches than in the whole of 2020, impacting hundreds of millions of people. The average cost of a data breach rose to US$4.24-million, the highest it’s been in 17 years.

What this illustrates is that online privacy and security is an ongoing battle and that organisations of all sizes will have to keep stepping up their efforts when it comes to protecting their customers and staff. While it’s hard to predict exactly how this will play out in 2022, there are several definite trends that will have an impact throughout the course of the year.

Privacy will become (even more) mainstream

With big tech embracing privacy, or at the very least making an effort, it’ll likely become even more mainstream. This will be a positive in many markets, especially where the majority of ordinary business owners are naive to their consumers’ privacy wants and needs.

A survey Zoho conducted earlier in 2021, for example, found that only 22% of South African businesses are aware of privacy laws governing their marketing activities, despite POPIA coming into effect on 1 July. It also found that while 76% of the businesses indicated that they have well-documented policies for customer data protection, only 57% are strictly applying those policies.

At Zoho, data privacy is perceived as not just a legal obligation but an ethical choice. The team is serious about customer data protection and strives to develop applications that treat user data responsibly.

In 2020, Zoho also took a strong stance against adjunct surveillance—the practice of monitoring data and activity through third parties, cookies, and trackers embedded in the software/website—and removed all invasive/non-essential third-party trackers from its websites.

The growing importance of (safely) dumping data

Having spent years trying to gather as much data as possible on their users, companies are starting to realise that it’s not always an asset. In fact, many organisations are sitting on vast “data graveyards” that are a major security liability.

The better they get at safely disposing of that data, the less risk they’ll face when it comes to cybersecurity breaches. With increasingly robust laws, companies will be forced to improve their governance but the organisations that fare best will be the ones that go above and beyond when it comes to data governance.

Increased demand for transparency

As an effect of privacy becoming an increasingly mainstream issue, it’s also become a much bigger concern for ordinary consumers who are turning privacy-conscious with each passing day. People want to know that companies aren’t going to collect data that they aren’t comfortable sharing and that the companies will be wholly transparent with the data they do collect. For the next few years, organisations that boldly come forward and declare their data collection practices with complete transparency and accountability will gain a competitive advantage.

A higher responsibility

Ultimately, the onus is on the organisations to set up a company-wide data governance framework which ensures that only the minimum necessary amount of data is collected from customers along with their explicit consent and is further used, stored, and managed responsibly.

Equally important, organisations should ensure that their business software providers and vendors also follow the same amount of strict guidelines, policies, and compliance procedures when it comes to data privacy.

About the author:

Andrew Bourne is Zoho’s Regional Manager for the Africa region and is based in Cape Town, South Africa. He has more than 15 years of experience in sales and marketing, and has spent the last five years focusing on the implementation and testing of various business technologies. He is very passionate about Zoho and has exceptional insight into the business and marketing world.