Zoho unveils Zia LLM & agent marketplace with focus on privacy

Zoho has introduced its proprietary large language model, Zia LLM, alongside new AI infrastructure investments designed to strengthen its business-focused artificial intelligence offerings and data privacy protections.

The suite of new tools includes the Zia LLM, over 25 prebuilt AI-powered agents available in an Agent Marketplace, the no-code Zia Agent Studio for custom agent building, and a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, providing third-party agents access to Zoho's extensive library of actions. These advancements are intended for both developers and end users, aiming to bring operational and financial efficiencies across a wide range of business needs and use cases.

Focus on technology and privacy

"Today's announcement emphasizes Zoho's longstanding aim to build foundational technology focused on protection of customer data, breadth and depth of capabilities, and value," said Mani Vembu, Chief Executive Officer at Zoho. "Because Zoho's AI initiatives are developed internally, we are able to provide customers with cutting-edge tool sets without compromising data privacy and organizational flexibility, democratizing the latest technology on a global scale."

The Zia LLM was developed entirely in-house using NVIDIA's AI accelerated computing platform and has been trained for Zoho product-specific use cases such as structured data extraction, summarisation, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and code generation. The model is comprised of three parameter sizes - 1.3 billion, 2.6 billion, and 7 billion - each optimised for different business contexts and benchmarked against similar open-source models.

Zoho says these models allow the platform to optimise performance according to user needs, balancing computational power with efficiency, and plans to continue evolving its right-sizing approach to AI model deployment. The Zia LLM will be rolled out across data centres in the United States, India, and Europe, initially being used to support internal Zoho applications and expected to become available for customer deployment in the coming months.

Expansion in language and speech technology

Alongside its language model, Zoho is launching proprietary Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models capable of performing speech-to-text conversion in both English and Hindi. These models operate with low computational requirements without a reduction in accuracy and, according to Zoho, can deliver up to 75% better performance than comparable models in standard benchmark tests. Additional language support is expected to follow, particularly for languages predominantly spoken in Europe and India.

While many large language model integrations are supported on the Zoho platform, including ChatGPT, Llama, and DeepSeek, the company emphasises that Zia LLM enables customers to maintain their data on Zoho's servers, thus retaining control over privacy and security.

Agentic AI technology

To promote adoption of agentic AI, Zoho has made available a range of AI agents embedded within its core products. These agents are tailored to support various common organisational functions such as sales, customer service, and account management.

The newly updated Ask Zia conversational assistant now features business intelligence skills suitable for data engineers, analysts, and data scientists, allowing them to build data pipelines, create analytical reports, and initiate machine learning processes within an interactive environment. A new Customer Service Agent has also been launched, capable of processing and contextualising customer requests, providing direct responses, or escalating queries to human staff as needed.

Zia Agent Studio and Marketplace

The Zia Agent Studio offers a fully prompt-based, optional low-code environment for building and deploying AI agents, giving users access to more than 700 predefined actions spanning the Zoho app ecosystem. Agents can be set for autonomous operation, triggered by user action, or integrated into customer communications. When deployed, these agents function as digital employees, adhering to existing organisational access permissions and allowing administrators to audit behaviour, performance, and impact.

Zoho's Agent Marketplace, now part of its existing marketplace offering over 2,500 extensions, allows for rapid deployment of prebuilt and third-party AI agents. A selection of prebuilt agents is available, including:

• Revenue Growth Specialist, identifying opportunities for customer upsell and cross-sell
• Deal Analyser, which provides insights such as win probability and proposed follow-up actions for sales teams
• Candidate Screener, ranking job applicants based on skills and suitability

Zoho has committed to regularly adding more prebuilt agents to address broader business needs and enabling ecosystem partners, independent software vendors, and developers to build and host additional agents.

MCP interoperability and future roadmap

The deployment of the Model Context Protocol server will permit any MCP client to access data and actions from a growing collection of Zoho applications within the customer's existing permission framework. Using Zoho Flow, certain third-party tools can also be accessed, and Zoho Analytics now includes support for a local MCP server. Expanded application support is planned throughout the year.

Looking forward, Zoho intends to scale the Zia LLM's parameter sizes and extend speech-to-text capabilities to more languages. Plans also include the future release of a reasoning language model, further enhancements to Ask Zia's skills for finance and support teams, and the addition of protocol support for agent intercommunication within and beyond Zoho's platform.

Zoho remains focused on balancing the ability to provide practical AI support for business needs with privacy requirements, stating that its models are not trained on consumer data and that no customer information is retained. The company reiterates its privacy pledge to customers, with complete oversight of data held in its own operated data centres.