Zoho Bets Big on AI with Proprietary Large Language Model, Agents Currently, India is Zoho's second largest market by revenue which grew 32 per cent in 2024 and at a CAGR of 51 per cent for the last 10 years

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) major Zoho on Thursday announced the launch of its proprietary large language model, Zia LLM, Automatic Speech Recognition 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 over 25 ready-to-deploy Zia Agents, including a few specifically for Indian customers. The announcements were made on the sidelines of Zoholics India, the company's annual user conference held this year in Bengaluru.

Currently, India is Zoho's second largest market by revenue which grew 32 per cent in 2024 and at a CAGR of 51 per cent for the last 10 years. The US continues to be the largest market while the UK, Canada, and UAE follow India as the next largest markets in that order.

"Today's announcement emphasises Zoho's longstanding aim 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 that they are able to utilise 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.

The LLM market is projected to grow from USD 7.79 billion to USD 130.65 billion by 2034, registering a CAGR of 36.8 per cent, according to a report by Polaris Market Research. The report further stated that Asia Pacific is projected to witness the fastest market growth during the forecast period, driven by digitalization, rising data generation, and increasing demand for multilingual AI solutions to support diverse, rapidly expanding digital economies.

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, 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.

"The three models allow Zoho to always optimise the right model for the right user context, striking the balance between power and resource management. This focus on right-sizing the model is an ongoing development strategy for Zoho. In the short term, Zoho will scale Zia LLM's model sizes, starting with the first set of parameter increases by the end of 2025," the company said in a statement.

While Zoho supports many LLM integrations for users, including ChatGPT, Llama, and DeepSeek, Zia LLM continues Zoho's commitment to data privacy by allowing customers to keep their data on Zoho servers, leveraging the latest AI capabilities without sending their data to AI cloud providers. 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 Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models for speech-to-text conversion for English and Hindi. Optimised to perform on a low computer load without compromising on accuracy, the models benchmark up to 75 per cent better than comparable models across standard tests, the company said. Zoho is touted as one of the first companies from India to have developed an English ASR model. It plans to expand the available languages, beginning with other Indian and European languages. It will also introduce a reasoning language model (RLM).

To enable immediate adoption of agentic technology, Zoho has developed a roster of AI agents contextually baked into its products. These agents can be used across various business activities, handling relevant actions based on the role of the user.

The company has also launched AI Agents specifically for Indian businesses for verification of PAN card, Voter ID, Udyog Aadhar, GSTIN, Driving Licence, LPG connection and Electricity Bill. These can be utilised for a variety of use cases, such as employee background verification by HR teams or for document verification in financial services organisations.