At a press conference for Zoho, Indian software company Zoho announced a set of proprietary AI tools, including an internal LLM called Zia, an automatic speech recognition (ASR) model and a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server.
The press conference featured some important comments from Zoho and ManageNentine's Director of AI Research, Ramprakash Ramamoorthy, Zoho CEO Mani Vembu.
Trained with Zoho-specific use cases, Zia LLM is available in three model sizes (1.3b, 2.6b, and 7b parameters) and is optimized for internal deployment of Zoho's entire suite of products. For training, the company leveraged NVIDIA's AI-accelerated computing platform. It supports summary, RAG, and code generation and is currently being tested in data centers in the US, India and Europe.
“This is not ChatGpt, this is not a consumer grade LLM,” says Ramamoorthy. “This is the Enterprise LLM backbone deeply bound by Zoho's tools. All self-hosted models are routed to Zia LLM.”
Zoho says LLM is designed to provide a variety of models tailored privacy for structured and unstructured data, making it cost-effective. “The 1.3 billion parameter model is not a 7 billion distilled version. It's built separately,” says Ramamoorthy.
Zoho also launched the ASR model in English and Hindi, claiming performance up to 75% over the standard benchmark. The model is optimized for low-resource environments and is planned to expand to 15 other Indian languages.
The addition of key infrastructure is Zoho's new MCP server aimed at enabling interoperability between applications and agents. “We're trying to build an AI stack. We need infrastructure. We build an AI layer, we build a search layer, we build all our tools, all our infrastructure, so that we can optimize costs and accuracy,” Vembu says.
Zoho has deployed more than 25 AI agents, including pre-built tools such as candidate screeners and Revenue Growth Specialist. These agents are integrated into Zoho's products and can be deployed as digital employees who define access and audit monitoring.
The company has also launched an AI agent for Indian companies to verify PAN cards, voter IDs, Udyog Aadhar, GSTIN, driver's licenses, LPG connections and electricity bills. Additionally, support for the agent2agent (A2A) protocol is implemented, allowing Zia agents to interact with each other and interact with agents on other platforms.
The company reported 32% year-on-year growth in India in 2024. Zoho's most popular products include Zoho One, CRM Plus and Zoho people, with BFSI, manufacturing and education sectors promoting adoption.
Zia LLM and related services will be deployed to early access customers who are expected to have general availability by the end of 2025
