Zoho launches free agentic AI upgrades across core business apps

Zoho has introduced free agentic artificial intelligence features across its Collaboration, Customer Experience, and Human Resources applications, aiming to facilitate AI adoption in businesses.

The AI-driven features are designed to automate routine processes and integrate seamlessly with company data, available at no additional cost for users of specific Zoho apps. By embedding these capabilities directly into widely-used business applications, Zoho intends to address common barriers such as complex integration, lack of preparedness for data utilisation, and financial hurdles often encountered by organisations attempting to adopt AI solutions.

Product suite updates

The new set of tools builds on Zoho's prior AI-focused launches, including Zia Hubs and Zia LLM. Zia Hubs enables AI to interact with and learn from unstructured company data. Zia LLM, Zoho's proprietary large language model, is specifically tailored for business-to-business use cases. These components underpin the agentic AI expansions now announced.

"Industry AI adoption has been stymied by a lack of data readiness, difficulty in integrating with legacy systems, and unnecessarily high costs passed down to the consumer," says Raju Vegesna, Zoho's Chief Evangelist. "Because Zoho is built on a single, internally-developed tech stack, incorporating agents into daily business operations requires nothing from the business: no adding third party tools, no extra time, and significantly, no extra costs. With Zoho, your business is future proofed: the latest tools simply arrive and work."

The company's agentic design allows features to operate across Zoho's single platform, enabling access to and use of information from multiple applications simultaneously. The features automate processes such as drafting documents, checking colleague availability for meetings, and identifying sales leads in email correspondence.

Collaboration enhancements

Within Zoho Workplace, several core modules have been updated. In Zoho Mail, the Ask Zia function uses agentic AI to understand multi-step instructions. This allows users to give commands such as requesting email summaries to be converted into documents and shared with a colleague across various integrated apps.

A Lead Generation Agent has also been introduced, capable of scanning a sales team member's unread inbox messages, flagging those that are sales queries, and automatically entering relevant ones as leads in Zoho CRM.

In collaborative software Tables, users can now use natural language prompts to create database structures suited to specific cases. Features for keyword extraction, sentiment analysis, and language detection have been added to streamline categorisation, content summarisation, and improve contextual analysis of business data.

Customer experience integrations

For customer service, Zoho Desk has gained new Zia Agents, notably a Resolution Expert. This agent builds a repository of ticket resolutions to boost agent efficiency and enrich self-help resources for recurring queries, aiming to reduce response time and improve quality of support.

Document management gains additions as well. Zoho Sign now features AI-driven agreement generation, letting users prompt the system to draft contracts or agreements that users can then customise. Ask Zia within Zoho Sign offers document proofreading, draft suggestions, and answers to key questions about agreements directly, removing reliance on third-party support.

Human Resources and recruitment

Zoho Recruit, designed for talent acquisition, now integrates agentic AI for candidate-job matching. The system reviews resumes against job descriptions, ranking and filtering candidates based on contextual fit and role requirements. AI-Assisted Assessment Generation further allows creation of recruitment assessments, supporting both automated and manual workflows for different users-candidates, recruiters, and interviewers.

This aims to make recruitment more efficient and ensure more accurate evaluations and job-fit decisions.

User and customer feedback

"With Zoho's AI and MCP features, this year we've easily implemented several significant changes to our workflows across Zoho Desk, Analytics, and CRM, allowing our sales team to scale from managing 300 leads a week to almost 1,000," says Philip Edey, Business Analyst at Arctic Spas Inc. "While many companies have over promised the benefits of agentic AI tools, seeing immediate results with Zoho's has been hugely exciting. As a longtime Zoho customer, they continue to provide tools that benefit us the most while taking the least amount of our effort."

Privacy and business model

Zoho states that it is designing AI features to prioritise both customer privacy and value, specifying that its generic AI models do not train on customer data nor retain any customer information. The company owns and operates its data centres, delivering full oversight of customer data and security.

The latest features are included for free with the relevant paid Zoho subscriptions, as part of the company's approach to balancing AI business utility with affordability for its users. The company's privacy policy forbids the use of an ad-revenue model across any of its products, whether free or paid, and Zoho reports a global user base surpassing 130 million.