Zoho brings AI to everyday work with Zia Chat, adds seven vertical SaaS offerings

Chennai-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) firm Zoho on Wednesday launched Zia Chat, an AI interface for employees to search information and carry out tasks across business applications through a single conversation.

The company also announced industry-specific offerings for seven sectors – retail, automotive, financial services, healthcare, education, real estate and restaurants.

Speaking with ET AI, cofounder and chief scientist Sridhar Vembu said Zoho wants AI to become part of the everyday software experience. “We want to make this completely ubiquitous, seamless and bundled into your experience... We call it friction-free work. That is the key.”


“AI is the new UI. Not user interface but ubiquitous intelligence,” Vembu said.

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The problem Zoho is trying to solve, as per Vembu, is an “interface crisis”, with employees hopping between applications and searching for information across different systems.

“Every day, employees waste their time navigating menus, hunting for dropdowns and fighting with fragmented software interfaces,” he said.

The company said Zia Chat brings together information in business applications with the capabilities of AI models, allowing users to ask questions, prepare documents and initiate tasks through a conversation.

Giving an example, Vembu said he had used the interface to locate an email from someone in the US seeking a job at Zoho, despite forgetting who had sent it. The system suggested three or four possible matches, he said.

“In a similar way, for doing research for presentations, I'm asking it to correlate information from our products, present it, and give it to me as a chart. Then, I embed it in my presentation. So, this is the AI vision for work,” Vembu added.

Businesses can choose commercial AI models, open-source alternatives or Zoho’s own models, Vembu said. The interface can also draw information from applications outside Zoho, the company said.

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Zoho said Zia Chat follows a user’s existing access permissions and requires them to review and confirm actions before anything is created, changed or sent. The company clarified that the data accessed through it is not used to train Zoho’s AI models.

Asked whether AI agents could reduce demand for software licences by taking over more work, Vembu focused on their role in helping employees rather than replacing them.

“For example, we are heavily using support agents in our own company, but we are not displacing a single support individual. All the support people are still there and we are hiring more,” he told ET AI.

Zoho’s expansion is built on its existing applications for functions such as sales, communication and finance, which is being adapted to specific business requirements, Vembu said.

The company said connecting industry-specific applications with its broader suite would give AI more context about a business, including the rules and processes that shape its work, rather than just isolated application data.

The new offerings include a dealer management system for automotive businesses, a loan processing platform for financial institutions, clinical documentation software and an education platform covering academic and administrative work.

Its retail offering includes software for managing customer relationships, while its real estate solution covers the property sales process. Restaurant software includes order, table, kitchen and inventory management, Zoho said.

“Our goal is to provide mass customisation of software. People can buy deep vertical software from us at the same mass-market price. That is the goal,” he said.