Zoho has launched a preview of preconfigured, task-specific Zia AI Agents.
Announced at Zoho Day 2025 in Austin, these AI Agents promise to automate various tasks across Zoho’s enterprise portfolio, which comprises 100+ products.
Zoho CRM is one such product. Within the solution, Zia Agents may take over service, sales, and marketing tasks, like resolving tickets, nurturing leads, and crafting campaigns.
Yet, the pre-configured agents expand much further, scheduling interviews for HR, tracking inventories for warehouse managers, and much more.
The tech giant also introduced a Zia Agent Marketplace where its customers can scope these agents, customize them, and – ultimately – deploy them within their Zoho environment.
In time, the marketplace may also provide templates and ideation points for users and partners.
To build upon these ideation points, customers may utilize the new Zia AI Studio, create their own AI agents for specific tasks, and mechanize more of the enterprise.
Overall, the announcement marks a significant shift for Zia as it evolves from copilot to autopilot.
Yet, Sridhar Vembu, Co-founder & Chief Scientist of Zoho, indicated that the company has many more major announcements to come. He said:
Utilizing Zoho's deep engineering expertise, its own data centers, 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.
Moreover, Zoho may continue to differentiate from many of its market competitors by building out its own infrastructure and much of its AI.
After all, by owning this infrastructure, Zoho lowers the total cost of ownership (TCO) for its customers. That could prove critical as enterprises worry about how their cloud costs may spiral as they add AI agents.
Moreover, by developing its AI – instead of just relying on off-the-shelf LLMs – Zoho can take a longer view and plan its roadmap without worrying about partner releases.
Finally, Zoho also benefits from the depth of its tech stack and - as Vembu alluded - shared data model. Martin Schneider, VP & Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, highlights this, stating:
With such a broad customer base, the company owning so many layers of the tech stack...they can aggregate and learn from an incredible wealth of both business data, but also the metadata and ops of building AI-powered use cases and apps.
Starting on February 4, 2025, Zoho will begin to roll out its Zia AI Agents to a limited set of customers, with new Agents becoming available monthly.
Vembu: Tech Companies Cannot Charge a Premium for AI Agents
OpenAI spent $90BN on GPUs alone last year, assuming ROI as its AI would prove so revolutionary that enterprises would all adopt it or risk being left behind.
Yet, the rise of DeepSeek has challenged this assumption and – according to Vembu – crystallized the idea that AI reasoning is becoming a "commodity".
"We'll call it the commodity reasoning engine," noted Vembu. "I believe 60 Chinese labs are working on them… 60 of them!"
