Fast Tracks Enterprise Automation: Zoho goes big on AI with launch of proprietary LLM, ASR, no-code agent builder

BENGALURU: Unveiling an end-to-end AI stack on Thursday here, Zoho announced the launch of a proprietary large language model (LLM), Zia LLM, automatic speech recognition (ASR) models in English and Hindi, a no-code agent builder, Zia Agent Studio, as well as a model context protocol (MCP) server to open up Zoho's vast library of actions to third-party agents.

Zoho also launched 25+ ready-to-deploy Zia Agents, including a few specifically for Indian customers. As per top officials, the global technology company grew by 32 per cent in 2024 in India. The announcements were made on the sidelines of Zoholics India, the company's annual user conference held this year in Bengaluru.

"Our aim is to build foundational technology focused on protection of customer data, breadth and depth of capabilities because of the business context, and value," said Mani Vembu, CEO, Zoho. "Our LLM model is trained specifically for business use cases, keeping privacy and governance at its core, which has resulted in lowering the inference cost, passing on that value to the customers, while also ensuring they are able to use AI productively and efficiently."

“Our differentiation comes from offering agents over our low code platform so that there is a human in the loop for verification and modification. We call this co-creation with the AI agent. It is much simpler to verify and make changes in the UI screen than reading the code. We are enabling this across all the features to make it simpler to verify and validate the AI output,” he added.

Zoho’s Zia LLM has been built completely in-house by leveraging NVIDIA's AI accelerated computing platform. Trained with Zoho product use cases in mind—ranging from structured data extraction, summarisation, RAG, and code generation—Zia LLM comprises three models with 1.3 billion, 2.6 billion and 7 billion parameters, each separately trained and optimised for contextual applicability that benchmark competitively against comparable open source models in the market.

Zia LLM has been deployed across Zoho's data centres in the US, India, and Europe. The model is currently testing for internal use cases across Zoho's broad app portfolio, and will be available for customer use in coming months.

Zoho also announced two proprietary ASR models for speech-to-text conversion for English and Hindi. The company plans to expand the available languages, beginning with other Indian and European languages. It will also introduce a reasoning language model (RLM).

First announced earlier in 2025, Zoho has further simplified the Zia Agent Studio experience to be fully prompt-based (with the option to use low-code) and includes ready-made access to over 700 actions across Zoho's products. The company has also launched AI agents specifically for Indian businesses for verification of PAN card, Voter ID, Udyog Aadhaar, GSTIN, driving licence, LPG connection and electricity bill.