Zoho rolls out new agentic AI features across enterprise apps amid ‘Swadeshi’ push | Technology News

AI agents are autonomous tools that perform tasks, make decisions, and interact with environments, requiring little human input. They are the focus of every tech giant providing enterprise solutions, including Google and Microsoft, as companies around the world look to automate workflows and boost productivity using AI.

With these new features, Zoho seems intent on capitalising on its recent surge in popularity in India, largely driven by the central government’s latest campaign to promote the use of ‘Swadeshi’ or ‘Made-in-India’ products and services amid rising tariff tensions with the United States.

Over the past few weeks, several ministers including Union Home Minister Amit Shah, Health Minister JP Nadda, and IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw have publicly announced that they have switched over to using Zoho Mail and Zoho Workspace tools for their official work.

However, the enterprise adoption of AI globally remains in its nascent stages. “Industry AI adoption has been hampered by a lack of data readiness, difficulty in integrating with legacy systems, and unnecessarily high costs passed down to the consumer,” Mani Vembu, CEO, Zoho, said in a statement.

“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,” Vembu added.

List of new agents and AI features

Zoho customers can use AI agents to automate various tasks such as pulling data from multiple text files and PDFs to generate an agreement, automatically converting sales queries to leads, inviting colleagues to a meeting based on who is on vacation, and more.

Here are more details on the different types of AI agents now available on Zoho’s platforms:

– Lead generation agent: Available on Zoho Mail and Zoho CRM. This AI agent is designed to autonomously scan a sales team member’s unread messages upon login, identify which messages are sales queries, and convert them into a lead within Zoho CRM.
– AI Base Creation: Available within Zoho Tables. This feature can be used to generate an entire database with various fields and sample data based on user prompts. It also uses AI agents to automatically identify and extract essential keywords based on the text placed within a particular field, along with sentiment analysis and language detection options.
– Resolution Expert: Available within Zoho Desk, Zoho’s customer service platform. This feature can be used to document ticket resolutions to enhance future customer support interactions.
– Candidate and Job Matches: Available on Zoho Recruit, its talent acquisition offering. The agentic AI feature analyses resumes, job descriptions, and candidate profiles to find individuals that are a good fit for the role. It also provides contextual analysis, dynamic ranking, and advanced filtering.
– AI-Assisted Assessment Generation: Also available via Zoho Recruit. Users can generate complete assessments of job candidates, recruiters, and interviewers. These AI-generated assessments will include questions, answers, and scoring weights specific to job requirements.

Most of these features are driven by Zoho’s proprietary large language model, Zia, which was launched in July this year. Zia LLM was built completely in-house by leveraging NVIDIA’s AI accelerated computing platform, as per the company. Zia Hubs, which grants AI access to unstructured company data, also forms the underlying tech foundation of these features.