Zoho is rolling out its own large language model, a no-code agent builder, and a new agent marketplace designed to help businesses automate tasks while keeping control of their data. These tools are all developed internally, allowing Zoho to avoid sending user information to outside AI platforms.
At the center of the launch is Zia LLM, a family of models built in-house using NVIDIA’s AI platform. There are three sizes available, each trained for practical business tasks like summarizing documents, pulling structured data, and generating code. Zoho isn’t chasing the biggest model title here. Instead, it wants to match each model to the task at hand to improve speed and efficiency without driving up costs.
Privacy is a clear focus. Zia LLM runs on Zoho’s own servers in the United States, India, and Europe. Customers who want to use external models like ChatGPT or Llama can still do so, but they also have the option to keep everything inside Zoho’s ecosystem.
To make adoption easier, Zoho is launching Zia Agents that plug directly into its existing apps. The updated version of Ask Zia now supports specific roles like data analysts and engineers, offering tools for building reports, creating dashboards, and even helping with machine learning models. There’s also a customer service agent built into Zoho Desk that can respond to tickets or escalate issues to a human rep.
For teams that want to create their own agents, the Zia Agent Studio offers a no-code experience with more than 700 built-in actions from Zoho’s app library. These agents can be triggered manually, through automation rules, or inside conversations. Users can also set them up as digital employees that follow team permissions and can be audited like regular staff.
To speed things up even more, Zoho is launching the Agent Marketplace, a catalog of prebuilt agents ready to deploy. These include tools like a revenue growth assistant, a deal analyzer, and a job candidate screener. Developers and partners will soon be able to build and share their own agents on the marketplace.
Zoho has also opened up its Model Context Protocol server, which lets third-party tools interact with Zoho apps in a secure and structured way. More than 15 Zoho apps are included in the early access phase, and support for Zoho Analytics and Zoho Flow is already underway.
Looking ahead, Zoho plans to scale up Zia LLM later this year, expand its speech-to-text support into more languages, and add new features to Ask Zia for finance and support teams. It also plans to support the Agent2Agent protocol, allowing different agents to work together across systems.
The new tools are currently available to early access users, with broader availability expected by the end of 2025. Pricing will be announced closer to launch. For now, Zoho is studying how customers are using the technology across different industries, team sizes, and regions.
What makes this move interesting is that Zoho isn’t just slapping AI onto its products to follow a trend. The company owns its infrastructure, avoids ads, and doesn’t train models on user data. This rollout is about giving customers powerful AI tools without sacrificing privacy or control.
