Zoho Announces Zia LLM and Deepens AI Portfolio with Prebuilt Agents, Custom Agent Builder, MCP, and Marketplace

Zoho Announces Zia LLM and Deepens AI Portfolio with Prebuilt Agents, Custom Agent Builder, MCP, and Marketplace

Homegrown, Business-Optimised Offerings Address Needs for Developers and End Users While Enhancing Platform Capabilities

Zoho Corporation, a global technology company, today announced additional investments and offerings in AI, including Zia LLM, a proprietary large language model; Zia Agents, with 25+ ready-to-deploy AI-powered agents available in Agent Marketplace; Zia Agent Studio, a no-code agent builder; and a model context protocol (MCP) server to open up Zoho’s vast library of actions to third-party agents. These capabilities and investments are designed to help organisations fully realise and maximise the value of contextual, assistive and agentic AI technology. Immediately impacting daily workflows for diverse roles and use cases, Zoho’s latest AI developments deliver operational and financial benefits across entire organisations.

“Today’s announcement emphasises Zoho’s longstanding aim to build foundational technology focused on protection of customer data, breadth and depth of capabilities, and value,” said Sridhar Iyengar, Managing Director, Zoho Europe. “Because Zoho’s AI initiatives are developed internally, we are able to provide customers with cutting-edge tool sets without compromising data privacy and organisational flexibility, democratising the latest technology on a global scale.”

Zia LLM, Built from the Ground Up and Optimised for Business

Zoho has successfully developed 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 is comprised of 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 proper balance between power and resource management. This focus on right-sizing the model is an ongoing development strategy for Zoho.

In addition to Zia LLM, Zoho is announcing two proprietary Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models for speech-to-text conversion for both 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. Language support for additional languages will be coming in the future.

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 will be 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.

Effective Native AI Agents Ready for Use

To enable immediate adoption of agentic technology, Zoho has developed a roster of AI agents contextually baked right into its products. These agents can be used across various business activities, handling relevant actions based on real-life organisational roles (including sales development, customer support, and account management).

Agents available today include:

New Version of Ask Zia: The latest version of Zoho’s platform-wide conversational AI assistant, Ask Zia’s new BI skills are tailored to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists, yet supports any user within an organisation. Ask Zia is now equipped with capabilities that directly address the unique pain points faced by each persona, whether it’s building end-to-end data pipelines for engineers, analysing data, creating reports and dashboards in an interactive conversation mode for analysts, or helping to jump start building ML models for data scientists.

Customer Service Agent: With the ability to process incoming customer requests, understand the context behind them, and either answer them directly or triage them to a human rep, the Customer Service Agent for Zoho Desk provides an efficient yet reliable first line of assistance, paving the way for quicker responses and resolutions.

AI Agent Studio and Marketplace

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 include ready-made access to over 700 actions across Zoho’s products. Agents built by users can be deployed autonomously, triggered through button click or rule-based automation, or summoned within customer conversations.

At the time of deployment, an agent can also be provisioned as a digital employee. Digital Employees respect defined user access permissions, maintaining the same permissions structures already defined within the organisation. Admins are able to 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.

Zoho Marketplace, which supplies over 2500 reliable extensions and integrations for Zoho users, now houses the Agent Marketplace, a dedicated section for AI agents that can be deployed by customers quickly. Ecosystem partners, ISVs, and individual developers will soon be able to create agents and host them on the Zia Agents Marketplace, further simplifying the adoption of agentic technology by organisations.

Some pre-built agents created with Zia Agent Studio (and available on the Zia Agent Marketplace) are:

Revenue Growth Specialist: Uncovers opportunities for upsell and cross-sell across existing customers, recommending the best marketing approach for each customer.

Deal Analyzer: Analyse deals and provide insights such as win probability, next best action, and follow-up suggestions.

Candidate Screener: Intelligently identifies and ranks the most suitable candidates for a specific job opening based on role requirements, skills, experience, and other key attributes.

Zoho will continue to add more pre-built agents to the Agent Marketplace over time to cover several valuable core and utility use cases across various business functions. The full list of available agents can be found under Additional Documentation.

With over 55 applications across one ecosystem, users can build agents to meet their organisation’s every need, no matter how specific. With Zia Agent Studio, Zoho users have access to the same tools as Zoho’s developers, ensuring that any agent a customer dreams of can be created with ease.

Interoperability with MCP

Zoho has adopted the model context protocol (MCP), offering its own MCP server with a rich action library across several applications, allowing any MCP client to tap into data and actions from various Zoho apps while respecting the customer’s defined permission structures.

Zoho’s MCP server has a library of actions from more than 15 Zoho applications exposed during Early Access. With Zoho Flow, third party tools are also exposed. Additional Zoho applications will be onboarded in the coming months. Furthermore, Zoho Analytics now offers support for a local MCP server.

Roadmap

In the short term, Zoho will be regularly scaling Zia LLM’s model sizes, starting with the first of several planned parameter increases by the end of 2025. Future planned releases include expanding the available languages used by the speech-to-text model, beginning with languages spoken primarily across Europe and India, as well as the introduction of a reasoning language model (RLM).

Additional skills will be added to Ask Zia, allowing it to act as an assistant to Finance teams, Customer Support teams, with more skills added in the future.

Support for the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol will be implemented, allowing for Zia Agents to interact and collaborate with each other as well as collaborate with agents on other platforms.

Availability and Pricing

Zia LLM will be available to Zoho customers in the coming months. Zia Agents, Zia Agent Studio, Agent Marketplace, and Zoho MCP Server are being rolled out to customers who are currently on the early access waiting list. General availability for these offerings is expected towards the end of 2025. Zoho expects to study the usage patterns of these customers across use cases, industries, geographical regions, and sizes during this early access phase. A pricing structure for the rest of these offerings can be expected at the time of general availability.

Zoho Artificial Intelligence Differentiation

Zoho is committed to designing and incorporating artificial intelligence guided by the principles of customer privacy and value. Our generic AI models across contextual, assistive, and agentic AI, are not trained on consumer data and do not retain customer information. Zoho builds AI tools with usefulness in mind, striking a balance between providing AI technology that assists workers while right-sizing models that don’t require burdening consumers with additional costs.