Zoho, the global software-as-a-service (SaaS) giant, has announced several new artificial intelligence (AI) products. On Thursday, the company unveiled its first in-house large language model (LLM) Zia, an automatic speech recognition (ASR) model, more than 25 pre-built AI agents, Zia Agent Studio marketplace, and a model context protocol (MCP) server to let third-party agents connect to its library. These announcements were made on the sidelines of Zoholics India, the company’s annual user conference, held in Bengaluru.
Zoho Introduces Native AI Model and AI Agents
The SeeS giant’s most notable new product is the Zia LLM, its first AI model developed entirely in-house on Nvidia’s AI-accelerated computing platform. The models are currently in the testing phase, but Zoho claims these will be available to its customers by the end of the year.
Zia is being built in three parameter sizes of 1.3 billion, 2.6 billion, and 7 billion. These models have been trained with Zoho’s product use cases in mind can perform a wide range of tasks including structured data extraction, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), code generation, and summarisation.
Zoho claims that these models scored competitively when compared to similarly sized open-source models. Notably, Zoho plans to scale the models’ sizes and will begin increasing parameter sizes by the end of 2025.
ASR is another area the company is building technologies for. It announced two new ASR models for speech-to-text conversion that support English and Hindi languages. Eventually, Zoho plans to expand the supported languages and add other Indian and European languages. A reasoning language model (RLM) is also in the company’s pipeline.
Zoho AI agents home screen
Photo Credit: Zoho
The company highlighted that it has developed more than 25 AI agents which are already integrated with Zoho’s products. One of the existing agents is Ask Zia, a conversational AI assistant that can analyse data, create reports and dashboards, and assist in building machine learning models. As part of the latest announcement, Ask Zia is also being improved to handle Finance and Customer Support teams.
Zoho also says it has improved the Zia Agent Studio, a platform to create AI agents, and made it entirely prompt-based. This means any agents built using the platform will not require extensive coding. These agents can be integrated with more than 700 actions across the company’s products. Interestingly, these agents can also be summoned within customer conversations.
Among the new pre-built agents is the Candidate Screener, a recruitment-focused agent that identifies and ranks suitable candidates based on role requirements, skills, experience, and other attributes. Another is Deal Analyser that can analyse deals and provide insights such as win probability and next best action.
Focusing on India, Zoho has launched several AI agents designed to handle the verification of PAN card, Voter ID, Aadhaar, GSTIN, driving licence, LPG connection, and electricity bill. These agents can be accessed via the company’s agent marketplace.
Finally, the SaaS giant has also adopted Anthropic’s MCP and has created in-house MCP server that allows third-party AI agents to access into Zoho’s data and actions from various first-party apps within the user’s defined permission structures. Currently, the server has more than 15 Zoho tools available in early access, and more tools will be added in the coming months. Third-party tools can be accessed via Zoho Flow.
