Zoho Corp., a leading global technology company, announced the launch of Zia LLM —the company's proprietary large language model, a no-code agent builder, Zia Agent Studio, over 25 deployable Zia agents, and a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region to open up Zoho's vast library of actions to third-party agents.

“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 Premanand Velumani, Associate Director, Strategic Growth Zoho MEA. "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."

Zia LLM: Custom-Built AI for the Enterprise

Zoho has successfully launched its own large language model, Zia LLM, 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. 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.

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. 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% better than comparable models across standard tests. Zoho will expand language support for ASR models to enable more inclusive AI adoption across diverse regions. It will also introduce a reasoning language model (RLM).

Prebuilt Agents, Agent Studio and Marketplace Designed for Real-World Impact  

Zoho has developed a roster of AI agents contextually baked right into its products to enable immediate adoption of agentic technology. These agents can be used across various business activities, handling relevant actions based on the role of the user. These include Customer Service Agent for Zoho Desk that can process incoming customer requests, understand the context, and either answer directly or triage them to a human rep, providing an efficient first line of assistance. 

Ask Zia, Zoho's platform-wide conversational AI assistant, is bolstered with additional BI skills, tailored to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists, while supporting all users within an organisation. It can build end-to-end data pipelines for engineers, analyse data, create reports and dashboards in an interactive conversation mode for analysts, or help jump start building ML models for data scientists.

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. Agents built by users can be deployed autonomously, triggered by button click, with rule-based automation, or even summoned within customer conversations.

At the time of deployment, an agent can be provisioned as a digital employee, maintaining the user access permission structure defined within the organisation. Admins can perform behavioural audits as well as performance and impact analyses on digital employees, ensuring that every agent is working as effectively as possible and within clear guardrails.

Several pre-built agents are now available for users, such as Candidate Screener, which identifies and ranks the most suitable candidates for a specific job opening based on role requirements, skills, experience, and other key attributes; Deal Analyser, which can analyse deals and provide insights such as win probability, next best action, and follow-up suggestions, and Revenue Growth Specialist, which suggests opportunities for upsell and cross-sell for existing customers.

These agents are available in Agent Marketplace from where customers can easily deploy them. Ecosystem partners, ISVs, and individual developers will be able to create agents and host them on the Zia Agents Marketplace in coming months.

The company plans to add more skills to Ask Zia, allowing it to act as an assistant to Finance teams, Customer Support teams to start with. Support for the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol will be implemented, allowing Zia Agents to interact and collaborate with each other, as well as collaborate with agents on other platforms.

Interoperability and Governance

Zoho’s adoption of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) allows clients to securely access and interact with workflows and actions across over 15 Zoho applications. MCP is  available in early access, and integrations via Zoho Flow extend its reach to third-party tools. Zoho Analytics now also supports a local MCP server, allowing for advanced contextual AI use cases while preserving data security and compliance.