Global technology company, Zoho, has announced the launch of a suite of powerful artificial intelligence (AI) innovations headlined by its proprietary large language model, Zia LLM. The unveiling also featured the introduction of Zia Agent Studio, a no-code agent builder, more than 25 deployable Zia agents, and a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, aimed at opening Zoho’s vast library of actions to third-party agents.
According to Zoho Nigeria’s Country Head, Kehinde Ogundare, the innovations highlight the firm’s commitment to foundational technology development, customer data protection, and delivering cost-efficient AI solutions tailored for business use cases.
Zia LLM was built in-house using NVIDIA’s AI accelerated computing platform and trained with Zoho product use cases in mind. It features three models with 1.3 billion, 2.6 billion, and 7 billion parameters, each optimised for different contextual applications, and benchmarked competitively against existing open-source models.
The company noted that this “right-sizing” approach helps balance performance with resource management. While supporting integrations with other LLMs such as ChatGPT and Llama, Zoho emphasised that Zia LLM prioritises data privacy by keeping customer information within Zoho servers, ensuring users leverage AI capabilities without reliance on external providers.
In addition, Zoho unveiled two Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models for English and Hindi, optimised for accuracy with low computing requirements, performing up to 75 per cent better than comparable models. The company also announced plans to expand language support and introduce a Reasoning Language Model (RLM).
To fast-track adoption, Zoho has rolled out prebuilt AI agents embedded in its products, such as customer service agents, data pipeline builders, deal analysers, and revenue growth specialists. These agents, accessible via the Zia Agent Marketplace, can be customised, deployed autonomously, and monitored by administrators to ensure effectiveness and compliance.
The company further disclosed that its Zia Agent Studio has been enhanced with prompt-based and low-code options, giving users access to over 700 actions across Zoho products. Ecosystem partners, independent developers, and ISVs will also be able to host and deploy agents on the marketplace.
Meanwhile, Zoho’s adoption of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) allows secure access to workflows across 15 applications, with early access already underway. The firm added that Zoho Analytics now supports a local MCP server, enabling advanced contextual AI use cases while preserving security and governance standards