Zoho Corp., a global technology company, announced the launch of Zia LLM, its proprietary large language model, in the Middle East and North Africa. The company also introduced Zia Agent Studio, a no-code agent builder, over 25 deployable Zia agents, and a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server to open Zoho AI library of actions to third-party agents.

Premanand Velumani, Associate Director, Strategic Growth at Zoho MEA, revealed that the LLM is built for business use cases with privacy and governance at its core. He added that Zoho aims to deliver lower inference costs while enabling enterprises to adopt AI more efficiently.

Zoho developed Zia LLM in-house using NVIDIA’s AI accelerated computing platform. It includes models with 1.3 billion, 2.6 billion, and 7 billion parameters, trained and optimized for contextual business use. The company plans to scale the model sizes further by the end of 2025.

While Zoho integrates with ChatGPT, Llama, and DeepSeek, Zia LLM reinforces its focus on data privacy by keeping customer data on Zoho servers. The model is currently being tested internally and will be available to customers in coming months.

Zoho also announced two Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models for English and Hindi. These are optimized for low computer load while delivering up to 75% better performance than comparable models. The company will expand ASR support to more languages and introduce a reasoning language model (RLM).

The company revealed several prebuilt AI agents designed for real-world impact. These include:

• Customer Service Agent for Zoho Desk to process and triage requests.
• Candidate Screener to identify and rank job applicants.
• Deal Analyser to provide insights such as win probability and follow-ups.
• Revenue Growth Specialist to suggest upsell and cross-sell opportunities.

Zoho has simplified Zia Agent Studio with a fully prompt-based interface, offering access to over 700 actions across its products. Agents can be deployed autonomously, triggered by rules, or integrated within customer conversations. Customers will also be able to access them through the Zia Agent Marketplace, where ecosystem partners and developers can host their own agents.

Ask Zia, Zoho’s conversational AI assistant, has gained new business intelligence skills. It can help engineers build pipelines, enable analysts to create dashboards, and assist data scientists in building ML models. More skills will be added for finance and customer support teams.

Zoho has adopted the Model Context Protocol to allow secure access to workflows across 15 applications. MCP integrations via Zoho Flow extend connectivity to third-party tools, while Zoho Analytics now supports a local MCP server for advanced contextual AI use cases with strong compliance.

Related post

View all