Global technology firm Zoho Corp. announced expanded investments and offerings in AI, including Zia LLM, a proprietary large language model, and Zia Agents, with more than 25 ready-to-deploy AI-powered agents available in Agent Marketplace. Related moves include Zia Agent Studio, a no-code agent builder, and a model context protocol (MCP) server that opens Zoho’s library of actions to third-party agents.
Built in-house by leveraging NVIDIA’s AI-accelerated computing platform and trained with Zoho product use cases in mind, Zia LLM comprises three models (1.3 billion, 2.6 billion and 7 billion parameters), each separately trained and optimized for contextual applicability.
Additionally, Zoho announced two proprietary automatic speech recognition (ASR) models for speech-to-text conversion for English and Hindi. Support for additional languages will be available in the future, the company said.
Though Zoho supports multiple LLM integrations for users, including ChatGPT, Llama and DeepSeek, Zia LLM also allows customers to keep their data on Zoho servers rather than sending it to AI cloud providers.
Zia LLM will be deployed across Zoho’s data centers in the United States, India and Europe. The model is currently testing for internal use cases across Zoho’s app portfolio and will be available for customer use in the coming months, officials said.
Elsewhere, Zoho has developed a roster of AI agents baked into its products that can be used across various business activities to handle relevant actions based on real-life organizational roles, such as sales development, customer support and account management. Agents available today include a new version of Ask Zia—Zoho’s conversational AI assistant—and Customer Service Agent, designed to process incoming customer requests, understand the context and either answer directly or transfer to a human representative.
In addition, the Zia Agent Studio experience has been simplified to be fully prompt-based (with the option to use low-code) and include ready-made access to more than 700 actions across Zoho products. Agents built by users can be deployed autonomously, triggered through button click or rule-based automation, or summoned within customer conversations, the company said. At the time of deployment, an agent can also be provisioned as a digital employee.
Zoho Marketplace, which supplies more than 2,500 extensions and integrations for Zoho users, now houses the Agent Marketplace, a dedicated section for AI agents that can be deployed quickly by customers. Ecosystem partners, independent software vendors and individual developers soon will be able to create agents and host them on the Zia Agents Marketplace, officials said.
Some pre-built agents created with Zia Agent Studio (and available on the Zia Agent Marketplace) are Revenue Growth Specialist, Deal Analyzer and Candidate Screener. Zoho intends to add more pre-built agents to the Agent Marketplace over time that will cover other business functions.
Finally, Zoho’s MCP server offers a library of actions from more than 15 Zoho applications exposed during the early access period. With Zoho Flow, third-party tools are also exposed. Additional Zoho applications will be onboarded in the coming months.
In the short term, Zoho plans to regularly scale Zia LLM’s model sizes, starting with the first of several planned parameter increases by the end of this year. 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), the company said.
Additional skills will also be added to Ask Zia, allowing it to act as an assistant to finance teams and customer support teams.
Support for the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol also will be implemented, allowing Zia Agents to interact and collaborate with each other, as well as collaborate with agents on other platforms.
Zia LLM is expected to 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 company’s early access waiting list, the company said. General availability is expected by the end of the year.
