New Delhi: Indian tech giant Zoho is stepping up its AI game. On July 17, the company announced a major expansion of its artificial intelligence portfolio with the launch of Zia LLM, its in-house large language model. Along with this, Zoho has introduced a new set of AI tools including prebuilt agents, a no-code agent builder, and a model context protocol (MCP) server. All of this is aimed at making AI more accessible and effective for businesses.
Unlike many other companies that rely heavily on third-party models, Zoho is taking the internal route. The new Zia LLM has been built from scratch by Zoho engineers using NVIDIA’s AI platform. According to the company, this allows them to optimise the models for specific business workflows while keeping user data private on Zoho servers.
What is Zia LLM and why it matters
Zia LLM is made up of three models with 1.3 billion, 2.6 billion, and 7 billion parameters. Each model has been trained separately to handle different tasks such as summarisation, code generation, data extraction, and retrieval augmented generation (RAG). The idea is to apply the right model based on context to balance performance and energy use.
Zoho says the models benchmark competitively against other open-source LLMs. They are already being tested internally across Zoho apps and will be made available to customers soon. Zia LLM will run on Zoho data centres in India, the US, and Europe.
The company has also rolled out two automatic speech recognition (ASR) models for Hindi and English. These are designed to be lightweight, fast, and accurate, especially for Indian users.
Agents that do the work for you
As part of the same update, Zoho is introducing 25+ AI-powered agents that users can plug into their workflows. These include:
- A customer service agent that can respond to tickets or escalate issues when needed
- A sales assistant to help with leads, follow-ups, and recommendations
- A new version of Ask Zia, the AI assistant now updated with BI tools for analysts, data engineers, and data scientists
Users can also build their own agents using the Zia Agent Studio. It supports no-code and low-code options and gives access to over 700 actions across Zoho’s app suite.
Once deployed, agents can act like digital employees. They respect user access rules and can be monitored for behaviour and performance.
A new marketplace and more interoperability
The company is also opening an Agent Marketplace, where businesses can find and deploy AI agents quickly. Soon, third-party developers and Zoho partners will be able to list their own agents as well.
To make the whole system work together, Zoho is introducing support for MCP, a protocol that lets different AI agents interact with each other and perform complex tasks using shared data and actions.
Zoho has already exposed MCP actions from 15 of its apps and plans to expand that. It is also adding support for Agent2Agent (A2A), a future update that will let different agents collaborate within and outside the Zoho ecosystem.
What next?
The tools are being rolled out to early access users now, with general availability expected by the end of 2025. The company will watch how these tools perform across different regions and industries before finalising pricing.