The IT Nerd

Zoho Corporation, a global technology company, today announced major enhancements to Catalyst by Zoho, its Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), now weaving agentic development capabilities directly into the coding environments developers already use. Additions include Agent Skills, a non-interactive command-line interface (CLI), and Model Context Protocol (MCP) support to Catalyst’s platform, along with new integrations for agentic AI coding assistants including Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex. To enhance accessibility and empower future developers, the platform is also offering a free student program that includes full-stack hosting, functions, database, and AI tooling.

Catalyst by Zoho bridges the gap between code generation and reliable deployment by giving agentic AI coding assistants a structured, deterministic way to build and deploy applications. Developers can use the AI coding assistants of their choice while Catalyst provides the underlying full-stack serverless infrastructure and controls, eliminating the need to stitch together multiple cloud services and vendors. This approach simplifies development and future iterations while reducing operational complexity,positioning Catalyst as a reliable partner as technical capabilities and customer needs evolve.

Turning AI-Generated Code Into Production-Ready Applications

AI coding assistants can generate code quickly, but getting it to production requires deep platform knowledge, cloud services, and deployment workflows. Catalyst brings these together on a single serverless full-stack cloud, offering AI coding assistants what they need to build, test, and deploy applications. These capabilities make this possible:

Catalyst Agent Skills gives coding assistants the context they need to understand Catalyst services, architecture, and recommended development patterns. Rather than relying on the model to determine how Catalyst should be used, the Skill guides the assistant toward the appropriate capabilities and workflows. By surfacing only the capabilities relevant to the task, they help assistants make the right application and service choices, optimize token use, and generate accurate, verified output even with lighter models.

The non-interactive CLI allows AI coding assistants to execute multi-step workflows in Catalyst from start to finish without requiring human input at every step. This reduces manual intervention and helps developers move faster from coding to deployment.

The Catalyst MCP server provides AI coding assistants direct access to Catalyst capabilities from the developer’s existing environment. Actions such as creating a database table or adding a column can be performed directly from VS Code, Claude Code, Cursor, or any AI IDE without switching to the Catalyst console, keeping development in one workflow and accelerating delivery.

Orchestration, built into the Skill, ties the three capabilities together. When an AI coding assistant faces a decision about how to execute a request, the Skill routes it deterministically down the CLI or MCP path rather than leaving that choice to the model. This approach lowers the developer’s cognitive load, reduces the risk of incorrect tool selection, and helps produce more reliable, production-ready applications.

Built on Zoho’s Platform with Humans in Mind

While each service may work well independently, managing a fragmented stack can add operational complexity and make security, privacy, and governance harder to maintain. Applications built on Catalyst run inside Zoho’s own data centers and inherit Zoho’s robust security infrastructure, including DDoS protection, SOC compliance, regular vulnerability assessment and penetration testing (VAPT), a web application firewall, and more.

Human oversight is built into the deployment process rather than added afterward, giving organizations greater control as AI becomes part of application development:

Decoupled environments keep development and production separate. Code moves to production by manual promotion only—ensuring the AI agent never touches production, eliminating the risk for error.

Scoped collaborator controls define who—or what—can participate in development and what actions they can perform.

Full audit trails provide records to assist with oversight, including application logs, platform logs and MCP tool-call logs. From this data, developers can track precisely what actions the AI agent took, and when. Every change after launch is versioned, attributable, and reversible.

What’s Next

Catalyst is advancing towards a new era of agentic software development, where developers can collaborate with increasingly capable AI agents to execute sophisticated workflows across the software development lifecycle—all on a governed, full-stack cloud foundation. Forthcoming changes include multi-agent hosting, AI tool connectors, agentic SDLC, and more.

Disclaimer: All trademarks, product names, and company names cited herein are the property of their respective owners.

Pricing and Availability

Catalyst by Zoho offers a monthly free tier for developers to explore the platform, plus $250 in free credits for users who want to go deeper over a six-month period. Catalyst is available for immediate use.

Catalyst continues to offer a straightforward pay-as-you-go pricing model, with every feature bearing a per-unit cost rather than a license fee layered on top of usage. Developers get full visibility into usage from the Catalyst console and can set budget alerts and ceilings to prevent unexpected bills. A structured subscription option is also available for teams that prefer predictable costs.

Catalyst remains completely free for students, no subscription or credit card required to deploy non-commercial applications.

Zoho’s Privacy Pledge

Zoho respects user privacy and does not run on an ad-revenue model in any part of its business, including its free products. The company owns and operates its own data centers, giving it full oversight of customer data privacy and security. More than 150 million users worldwide, across more than 1 million paying organizations, rely on Zoho to run their businesses, including Zoho itself. For more information, visit zoho.com/privacy-commitment.html.

Zoho Corporation today released the State of Workforce Password Security 2026, a global research study of 3,322 verified respondents across nine regions, six industries, and twelve roles. Conducted by Tigon Advisory Corp. on behalf of Zoho Vault, Zoho’s password management platform, the report documents a widening disconnect between how organizations assess credential risk and how they have invested to address it. Findings from 174 Canadian respondents indicate that Canada’s relative position is better than the global average, but it is still vulnerable.

The report, released ahead of World Password Day, arrives at what the authors describe as a critical inflection point. Across the global sample, one-in-three businesses reported a confirmed cyberattack in the past year, and a further 7% were unable to confirm whether they had been attacked at all. In Canada, the attack rate dipped to 30%, three points below the global average, and four points below the U.S.

The State of Security in Canada

There is a consistent theme across the Canadian data: cautious maturity based on better-than-average spending intent, awareness and deployment metrics. Among Canadian respondents:

• 30% experienced a confirmed cyberattack in the past year, compared with 32% globally.
• 73% lack complete identity visibility across their workforce, including orphaned accounts and undocumented access, one point below the global average.
• 71% plan to increase security spending in 2026: one point below the global average.
• 60% of employees use 15 or more business applications, one point above the global average.
• 63% have not deployed a Zero Trust strategy, with most non-adopters expecting to implement within one to three years.

The AI Belief-to-Deployment Gap

The starkest finding for Canada concerns artificial intelligence in workforce security. 89% of respondents believe AI will strengthen their security posture — one point below the global average — yet only 46% report being ready to deploy AI-powered security today.

The report identifies legacy infrastructure (cited by 52% of global respondents) and migration complexity (48%) as the primary blockers. Cost ranks third at 41%, reinforcing a recurring theme across the data: the constraint on security maturity is not budget but architecture.

The Third-Party Problem

The report highlights that third-party access is a distinctly Canadian risk. The majority of organizations (73%) cannot fully account for who can access their systems. Canada’s heavily integrated North American supply chain creates identity visibility gaps and reveals that Canada and the US are more alike than different: which matters for organizations operating across both countries.

Additionally, Canada and the U.S. share the same top two threats (phishing at 67%/71%, weak passwords at 61%/63%), nearly Identical Zero Trust gaps (63%/62%), and similar Identity visibility failures (73%/76%). The two markets are more alike than different – which matters for organizations operating across both, and for vendors whose North American strategy treats them as distinct.

What the Data Recommends

The report concludes with six imperatives for 2026, prioritized by deployment urgency: deploy a centralized password manager, close the identity visibility gap, pair password management with multi-factor authentication, build a Zero Trust roadmap, treat integration as a security requirement, and pilot AI-powered credential security within the next twelve months.

Methodology

The State of Workforce Password Security 2026 was conducted by Tigon Advisory Corp. and sponsored by Zoho Corporation. The study is based on 3,322 verified responses across nine regions (United States, Canada, United Kingdom, European Union, India, Middle East and Africa, Australia and New Zealand, Japan, and China), six industries, and twelve workforce roles. Data was collected in early 2026. The full report, including all regional snapshots and methodology notes, is available at https://www.zoho.com/vault/state-of-workforce-password-security-report.html.

Zoho Corporation, a leading global technology company, today announced numerous enhancements to Zoho One, its all-in-one business software platform, featuring an evolution in the user experience that facilitates easy and secure collaboration. The new Zoho One offers a seamless experience across its 50 applications, putting the user and context at the core.

Originally launched in 2017 as a first-of-its-kind suite allowing businesses to run every aspect of their organization, today, Zoho One includes over 50 applications and serves over 75,000 customers worldwide, with an average of more than 22 apps used per customer. The software platform stands out for its privacy, security, and trust, underpinned by Zoho’s ownership of the entire technology stack. End-to-end control, coupled with deep integrations, ensures consistent reliability and compliance, equipping organizations with a competitive edge through seamless, intelligent operations.

Zoho One’s new features offer unification across three domains: Experience, Integrations, and Intelligence.

Experience – removing boundaries between apps

Zoho One’s new UX offers a connected, context-aware user experience:

• Spaces bring easier access to your everyday apps. Apps within Zoho One are grouped into Spaces across the top toolbar, and each serves a distinct purpose. Personal includes apps unique to the individual, including personal productivity software. Organization includes tools for company-wide communication (Forums, Town Hall, Ideas, and more). There are also function-specific spaces grouped by Department (HR, Marketing, Finance, and more). All of these spaces can be customized to better serve employees’ needs. The Spaces toolbar also includes a centralized search bar from which users can quickly search across the entire Zoho One ecosystem as well as automate actions within task-based workflows, without having to switch apps.
• Action Panel and Quick Navigation keep employees informed and on task. The highly customizable Action Panel provides the user access to their full day with one click, no matter which Zoho app they’re in. Add from a variety of app sources to build a panel that easily shows upcoming meetings, uncompleted tasks, scheduled Cliq messages or emails, and more.
• Dashboard and Boards remove boundaries between apps. Zoho One’s expanded dashboard consolidates data from all connected apps, even third party, into a single location that can be personalized using pre-existing or custom widgets. Users can exercise control over the entire software suite from this centralized hub, including support for additional dashboards from specific apps.
• A new approach to workplace collaboration. Today’s announcement includes the addition of Vani to Zoho One, offering an all-in-one, visual-first intelligent virtual space. With Vani, Zoho One users can brainstorm, plan, and innovate together – across things like flowcharts, whiteboards, diagrams, mind mapping, and video calling.

Integrations – delivered natively

When anchored by Zoho One, a company’s tech stack benefits from the software’s security features like smart offboarding, easy management of employee devices, and support for encryption keys. Furthering security is Zoho’s native integration, reducing entry points for potential breaches and streamlining anomaly detection, and Zoho Directory, providing admins a secure platform for workforce identity and access management, included as part of Zoho One.

Zoho One offers native integration with Zoho apps and third-party software. Various types of integrations are supported:

• Unified integrations. Zoho One delivers native integration between other Zoho solutions and third-party software. These can be monitored and configured from an integrations panel within Zoho One. Users can also create integration flows and monitor their usage.
• Foundational integrations. Zoho One offers a Unified Portal, a customizable space where users can consolidate all of their application-specific portals, allowing for control over multiple apps from a single screen. The Unified Portal support all third-party software portals, even those from custom apps.
• Pragmatic integrations. Important support tasks, such as domain verification, can be configured with their corresponding integrations, ensuring the proper authentications take place.
• Outcome-based integrations. Workflows that extend across many steps often require multiple apps, and Zoho One allows for the proper integrations along the way. One example is Zoho One’s new Smart Offboarding tool: From within a single workflow, employees can easily transfer department ownership to a new department head, manage employee device data from a single menu, and decide what happens to a user’s application data to ensure no loss of access.

Intelligence – unified and contextual

Zoho’s AI assistant, Zia, is now prominently featured across all of Zoho One.

• Intelligence aggregated. Zia can aggregate and contextualize data from multiple platforms—such as Google Workspace or third-party apps—into a single, actionable answer. This federated intelligence enables organizations to make faster, more informed decisions, eliminating data silos and enhancing productivity.
• Hub for intelligence. Zoho’s intelligent content management system, Zia Hubs, has its own dedicated space within Zoho One alongside pre-created, dedicated workflows that automatically bring more utility to company data. Now, executed contracts from Zoho Sign and recorded Zoho Meetings conversations both automatically go into Zia Hubs folders, allowing contract details and relevant conversational details to be surfaced in a Zia Search.
• Integrated and Contextual intelligence. Ask Zia is easily accessible within the bottom toolbar, allowing fast, prompt-based searches, pulling relevant data across multiple Zoho apps to provide a full picture of a user’s schedule, unfinished tasks, or the latest action items from a meeting. Given the broad set of apps that are deeply integrated into Zoho One, Ask Zia can also deliver highly contextual intelligence to guide decision-making.

More Functionality, More Apps, The Same Price

Despite the addition of these new features and Vani, Zoho’s visual collaboration platform, pricing for Zoho One remains at $37 per month per user. Zoho One is immediately available globally.

As AI adoption accelerates across Canada, new research from Zoho reveals that Canadian business professionals are successfully navigating the intersection of innovation and privacy. The findings, based on the infographic at the end of this email, provide insights about enterprise strategy, digital transformation, and the Canadian business advantage.

Key highlights:

• Leaders aren’t leading the charge: only 26% of CEOs/presidents/owners are leading AI adoption. While the majority (52%) of the adoption is being initiated by their teams. 
• AI momentum: 84.5% of Canadian organizations are actively exploring or implementing AI. However, 16% have yet to adopt it.
• Privacy as strategy: Canadian organizations view privacy as an AI enabler, not a barrier. 71% rate their privacy investments as “adequate to excellent,” and nearly half dedicate 11–30% of their IT budget to privacy.
• Canadian advantages: educated workers, innovation capability, global reputation, tech hubs, and social policies.
• Versus the U.S.: 14% of U.S. respondents have advanced integrations vs. 7% for Canadians

UPDATE: The research can be found here.

Zoho Corporation, a global technology company, today announced 40% YoY customer growth from global small businesses in the first half of 2025. Zoho’s broad, deep, and integrated product ecosystem uniquely addresses critical technology needs of SMBs: usable, scalable, affordable, and contextual tools. To further support this segment, Zoho is also releasing new developments across its SMB tech portfolio designed to improve productivity, revenue optimization, and operations for customers, allowing them to focus on future growth and opportunity.

In order to boost productivity, alleviate operational pain points, and encourage growth, Zoho is introducing the following developments to six key SMB solutions: Bigin by Zoho CRM, Zoho Commerce, Zoho Solo, Zoho Contracts, Zoho Start, and Zoho Notebook.

New Revenue Optimization Capabilities  

Bigin by Zoho CRM was launched in 2020 as a unified platform that small business owners can use to keeps track of customers and sales, regardless of their familiarity with CRM systems. New capabilities to Bigin include built-in booking management, integrations with Quickbooks Online, Shopify, as well as 10+ payment gateways, including Stripe and PayPal. This is in addition to Bigin’s pre-built integrations with Zoho Books and Zoho Payments, which enable businesses in the Zoho ecosystem to manage their finances seamlessly. The platform features on-device AI assistance for mobile apps, powered by Gemini Nano, Apple Intelligence, and Galaxy AI. It supports lead capture from Google Ads, WhatsApp, TikTok, and Meta Ads.

Several new Bigin capabilities will be rolling out in the coming months. They include:

• Integration with Zoho MCP, allowing users connect their Bigin account with LLMs like Claude to get contextual insights around their CRM data. 
• Integration with Zia AgentStudio, allowing users to build custom AI agents for Bigin
• Three prebuilt AI agents—Reply Assistant, Cross-sell Genie, and Churn Analyzer
• AI-powered writing assistance, live translation, record summary, and dashboard creation
• Automated chart and KPI creation powered by Zia

Zoho Commerce—part of the broader Zoho’s Finance platform—helps businesses build, market, and manage their storefronts, allowing users to maximize revenue intake.

With the recently enhanced version of Zoho Commerce, businesses are enabled to sell digital downloads along with physical products, manage loyalty point programs to attract more customers, and prevent revenue leakage by tracking and recovering cart abandonment. It also focuses on end-to-end order lifecycle management and workflow automation, allowing retailers to streamline their entire internal process.

Additional key updates from Zoho Commerce include:

• More than 15 new store templates for faster online store creation
• Native mobile applications for iOS and Android phones
• Social selling is now supported, allowing retailers to sell using multiple channels including WhatsApp. This allows customers to view the catalogue from the business profile, add items to cart, and automatically transition to the online store for a smooth checkout experience.
• Businesses who operate in B2B and wholesale can now manage quote requests, price negotiations, and set credit limits.

Zoho Solo is a unified application that allows “solopreneurs” to perform essential business functions such as client management, expense tracking, invoicing, payments, task management, and reporting—all from within a single solution. Zoho Solo is mobile-first and completely optimized for iPads and Android tablets. The app now supports timesheets, notes, reminders, mileage tracking, events, financial reports, and card scanning. There will be more Zoho Solo capabilities rolling out in the coming months, including, multi-currency support, inventory management, and AI insights to help users drive revenue.

New Operations Capabilities  

Zoho Contracts streamlines the contract lifecycle, improves compliance, mitigates risks, and now includes an AI assistant to help with every stage of the contract process. Small businesses have access to self-service templates, automated approvals, online negotiations, and built-in e-signatures that accelerate the contract turnaround.

New additions to Zoho Contracts include:

• Deeper integration with Zoho CRM
• Enhanced digital signature capabilities
• Multi-organization support
• Integration with ChatGPT
• Ability to manage counterparty-initiated contracts

New Productivity Capabilities, Powered by Zia

Zoho Notebook, the company’s note-taking app, has seen regular feature updates to centralize information across teams to better serve SMBs. Notebook provides shared workspaces for teams, projects, or departments, a whiteboard feature that includes not just text, but images, drawings, and shapes, and contextual integrations across the Zoho ecosystem, including CRM, Projects, and Mail, allowing Notebook to be the single source of documentation within an organization.

Notebook AI, utilizing the capabilities of Zia, Zoho’s in-house AI engine, is now available within Zoho Notebook. Other new features include:

• AI Transcription – automatically converts audio into structured, time-stamped notes with speaker labels and summaries
• AI Mind Maps – turns long notes into clean, visual mind maps with a single clickAI writing assistant – summarizes, rewrites, fixes grammar, and changes tone across any note
• AI-generated Smart Tags – assists the user in organizing notes faster
• Voice Search & Translation – easily find and convert content across languages
• In the coming months, Notebook will be rolling out new capabilities, including meeting notes intelligence, integration with Bigin, and a deeper integration with Zoho CRM to provide sales teams with contextual insights.

Pricing and Availability

All apps are immediately available.

 Zoho Corporation today announced additional investments and offerings in AI, including Zia LLM, a proprietary large language model; Zia Agents, with 25+ ready-to-deploy AI-powered agents available in Agent Marketplace; Zia Agent Studio, a no-code agent builder; and a model context protocol (MCP) server to open up Zoho’s vast library of actions to third-party agents. These capabilities and investments are designed to help organizations fully realize and maximize the value of contextual, assistive and agentic AI technology. Immediately impacting daily workflows for diverse roles and use cases, Zoho’s latest AI developments deliver operational and financial efficiencies across entire organizations.

Zia LLM, Built from the Ground Up and Optimized for Business

Zoho has successfully launched its own large language model, Zia LLM, built completely in-house by leveraging NVIDIA’s AI accelerated computing platform. Trained with Zoho product use cases in mind—ranging from structured data extraction, summarization, RAG, and code generation—Zia LLM is comprised of three models with 1.3 billion, 2.6 billion and 7 billion parameters, each separately trained and optimized for contextual applicability that benchmark competitively against comparable open source models in the market. The three models allow Zoho to always optimize the right model for the right user context, striking the proper balance between power and resource management. This focus on right-sizing the model is an ongoing development strategy for Zoho.  

In addition to Zia LLM, Zoho is announcing two proprietary Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models for speech-to-text conversion for both English and Hindi. Optimized to perform on a low computer load without compromising on accuracy, the models benchmark up to 75% better than comparable models across standard tests. Language support for additional languages will be coming in the future. 

While Zoho supports many LLM integrations for users, including ChatGPT, Llama, and DeepSeek, Zia LLM continues Zoho’s commitment to data privacy by allowing customers to keep their data on Zoho servers, leveraging the latest AI capabilities without sending their data to AI cloud providers.

Zia LLM will be deployed across Zoho’s data centers in the US, India, and Europe. The model is currently testing for internal use cases across Zoho’s broad app portfolio, and will be available for customer use in coming months. 

Effective Native AI Agents Ready for Use

To enable immediate adoption of agentic technology, Zoho has developed a roster of AI agents contextually baked right into its products. These agents can be used across various business activities, handling relevant actions based on real-life organizational roles (including sales development, customer support, and account management).

Agents available today include: 

1. New Version of Ask Zia : The latest version of Zoho’s platform-wide conversational AI assistant, Ask Zia‘s new BI skills are tailored to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists, yet supports any user within an organization. Ask Zia is now equipped with capabilities that directly address the unique pain points faced by each persona, whether it’s building end-to-end data pipelines for engineers, analyzing data, creating reports and dashboards in an interactive conversation mode for analysts, or helping to jump start building ML models for data scientists.
2. Customer Service Agent: With the ability to process incoming customer requests, understand the context behind them, and either answer them directly or triage them to a human rep, the Customer Service Agent for Zoho Deskprovides an efficient yet reliable first line of assistance, paving the way for quicker responses and resolutions.  

AI Agent Studio and Marketplace

First announced earlier in 2025, Zoho has further simplified the Zia Agent Studio experience to be fully prompt-based (with the option to use low-code) and include ready-made access to over 700 actions across Zoho’s products. Agents built by users can be deployed autonomously, triggered through button clicks or rule-based automation, or summoned within customer conversations.

At the time of deployment, an agent can also be provisioned as a digital employee. Digital Employees respect defined user access permissions, maintaining the same permissions structures already defined within the organization. Admins are able to perform behavioural audits as well as performance and impact analyses on Digital Employees, ensuring that every agent is working as effectively as possible and within clear guardrails.

Zoho Marketplace, which supplies over 2500 reliable extensions and integrations for Zoho users, now houses the Agent Marketplace, a dedicated section for AI agents that can be deployed by customers quickly. Ecosystem partners, ISVs, and individual developers will soon be able to create agents and host them on the Zia Agents Marketplace, further simplifying the adoption of agentic technology by organizations. 

Some pre-built agents created with Zia Agent Studio (and available on the Zia Agent Marketplace) are:

1. Revenue Growth Specialist: Uncovers opportunities for upsell and cross-sell across existing customers, recommending the best marketing approach for each customer.

2. Deal Analyzer: Analyze deals and provide insights such as win probability, next best action, and follow-up suggestions.

3. Candidate Screener: Intelligently identifies and ranks the most suitable candidates for a specific job opening based on role requirements, skills, experience, and other key attributes.

Zoho will continue to add more pre-built agents to the Agent Marketplace over time to cover several valuable core and utility use cases across various business functions. The full list of available agents can be found under Additional Documentation.

With over 55 applications across one ecosystem, users can build agents to meet their organization’s every need, no matter how specific. With Zia Agent Studio, Zoho users have access to the same tools as Zoho’s developers, ensuring that any agent a customer dreams of can be created with ease. 

Interoperability with MCP

Zoho has adopted the model context protocol (MCP), offering its own MCP server with a rich action library across several applications, allowing any MCP client to tap into data and actions from various Zoho apps while respecting the customer’s defined permission structures.

Zoho’s MCP server has a library of actions from more than 15 Zoho applications exposed during Early Access. With Zoho Flow, third-party tools are also exposed. Additional Zoho applications will be onboarded in the coming months. Furthermore,, Zoho Analytics now offers support for a local MCP server. 

Roadmap

In the short term, Zoho will regularly scale Zia LLM’s model sizes, starting with the first of several planned parameter increases by the end of 2025. Future planned releases include expanding the available languages used by the speech-to-text model, beginning with languages spoken primarily across Europe and India, as well as the introduction of a reasoning language model (RLM).

Additional skills will be added to Ask Zia, allowing it to act as an assistant to Finance teams and Customer Support teams, with more skills added in the future.

Support for the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol will be implemented, allowing for Zia Agents to interact and collaborate with each other, as well as collaborate with agents on other platforms.

Additional Documentation
Zia Agents Marketplace – Full list of available agents at launch

Availability and Pricing

Zia LLM will be available to Zoho customers in the coming months. Zia Agents, Zia Agent Studio, Agent Marketplace, and Zoho MCP Server are being rolled out to customers who are currently on the early access waiting list. General availability for these offerings is expected towards the end of 2025. Zoho expects to study the usage patterns of these customers across use cases, industries, geographical regions, and sizes during this early access phase. A pricing structure for these offerings can be expected at the time of general availability.  

Zoho Corporation today launched Zia Hubs, a solution within Zoho WorkDrive, that exposes new forms of unstructured business data to the company’s broad portfolio of applications and AI services. Using Zia Hubs, organizations can now present any type of business content to Zoho’s powerful capabilities and services, including agentic AI, comprehensive analysis, and accurate, unified search, regardless of file format or structure.

Deeper Intelligence Accessing More Customer Data

Today, Zia Hubs launches as part of Zoho WorkDrive, bringing content intelligence to the company’s unified content management and collaboration platform. Designed with a high level of user control over what content AI is allowed to access, Zia Hubs enables users to organize project or task-specific content into dedicated hubs within WorkDrive. Each hub serves as a focused space where Zia, Zoho’s flagship AI, can understand and act on the content stored within. This includes a wide range of content formats such as PDFs, documents, videos, and audio files. 

Zia Hubs automatically organizes the uploaded content in each hub by grouping related information such as section headings, supporting text, and visuals to preserve context. For video and audio files, Zia generates transcripts and links key moments to relevant topics, making it easy to pinpoint exactly where something was said. 

With Zia Hubs, users are able to:

1. Have Zia surface the most relevant answers when asked a question, even across different content formats. Each response includes clear citations that link back to the original content, whether it’s a document, spreadsheet, image, or a specific moment in an audio or video file.

• Create custom workflows with Zoho Flow, automating document storage process for particular projects or pertaining to specific teams within an organization, ensuring that Zia always has access to the latest necessary documents, automatically. 
• Utilize the full spectrum of an organization’s software suite: content from third-party software, such as Docusign PDFs, RingCentral call logs, Zoom video files, and more, are all readable by Zia, and can automatically be placed into a hub by building a workflow with Zoho Flow.
  

From Intelligent Content to Intelligent Action with Zia

Zia Hubs is a foundational element of Zoho’s long-term AI strategy, laying the groundwork for a future where intelligent agents can act contextually on content across the company’s entire product suite. With full ownership of its technology stack spanning more than 55 products, Zoho is uniquely positioned to help organizations unlock deeper value from their business content compared to competitors.

Future updates to Zia Hubs will allow it to identify structured information within unstructured files and trigger specialized agents tailored to specific business needs, further utilizing Zia Hubs as the central content intelligence layer that activates AI-native workflows across the full Zoho ecosystem.

Availability and Pricing

Zia Hubs launches in early access today for selected users of Zoho Workdrive in the United States, with a general release for both US and international users scheduled for the end of Q3 2025.

Zoho Corporation, a global technology company, today added deeper AI and work orchestration capabilities to its CX platform, all powered by Zia, Zoho’s in-house AI engine. These AI capabilities remove technological barriers to CRM adoption across groups of people working to serve the customer.

As of today, CRM For Everyone is generally available to global businesses. The platform enters the market having added deep Zia capabilities as well as two new features: Connected Records and Connected Workflows.

Deep Zia Capabilities

Report Creation with Ask Zia: Agentic capability wherein a user issues a prompt to create a report, which Zia builds on the user’s behalf. Zia creates the report according to that user’s permissions, and the user can visualize Zia’s build process in real time. The user can also interrupt Zia to make additional changes, then ask Zia to resume after the override. This is one of many use cases coming to Zoho’s agentic AI deployment.

Custom Module Creation: A no-code experience to use plain language to customize the CRM implementation, such as creating modules, modifying field types, and customizing permission configurations

Workflow Creation with Ask Zia: Utilize plain text prompts to create custom workflows. Zia, acting as an agent, performs tasks on the user’s behalf, such as creating requested workflows. Zia’s agentic capabilities make it easy for anyone to set up custom workflows using simple prompts.

Image to Canvas: An image-to-design capability allowing users to bring an image to life by adding a visual design layer to the system of record, which is CRM.

Improving Customer Experience with CRM For Everyone

CRM For Everyone expands on its innovative approach to CX with the addition of Connected Records, which automatically links work across team modules to ensure the smooth flow of context through the customer journey, and Connected Workflows, an orchestration engine and builder that automatically coordinates work across the many teams involved in delivering the customer experience. These features ensure that all teams across sales, marketing, onboarding, account management, finance, and legal have relevant access to all information, bringing a higher level of consistency to customer interaction at all points in the lifecycle.   

Availability and Pricing

Unless explicitly stated otherwise, AI capabilities are included in license costs for customers. Under CRM For Everyone, Team user (non-sales CRM users) licenses start at CDN $14 per user per month on all paid editions of Zoho CRM. 

Zoho Corporation, a global technology company, today announces Ulaa Enterprise, an enterprise-ready version of the company’s privacy-focused browser tailored specifically to the security and visibility needs of enterprise organizations. With Ulaa Enterprise, companies can prevent threats at the browser level while striking a balance between potent security, ease-of-use, and extensive control features, all without the complexity of third-party tools or virtual environments. 

Security for the Modern Workplace 

Modern browsers serve as enterprise workspaces, with employees performing critical operations across SaaS apps, handling corporate data, and managing transactions entirely through browser windows. Ulaa Enterprise is built with protection at its core, reducing reliance on external tools and ensuring tighter security without requiring extra layers, third-party integrations, significant IT overhead, or virtual desktop software prone to lag. 

Ulaa Enterprise offers the following security features: 

• Centralized Policy Management: Admins can define access controls, restrict downloads, manage extensions, and govern user behavior through central policies applied across users and groups. 
• Data Loss Prevention (DLP): Ulaa enforces DLP at the browser layer, blocking unauthorized uploads, copy-paste actions, screen captures, and downloads of sensitive data. 
• Complete Visibility and Granular Control: IT teams can monitor risks, view detailed audit logs, and enforce security policies with precision at the browser level, reducing or eliminating the need for reactivity. 

Enhanced by AI Zia

Zoho’s AI-driven automation and insights agent, is fully integrated with Ulaa Enterprise and offers enhancements that allow IT teams to maintain control while ensuring efficient and secure operations: 

• ZeroPhish (powered by Zia): Detects phishing attempts before users click, analyzing URLs and page behavior to block evolving threats in real-time. 
• Smart Web Categorization: Zia automatically categorizes websites and blocks unsafe content, ensuring secure browsing. 
• Tab Organization: Zia organizes tabs based on user behavior, improving productivity and browser management. 

Usable by IT and Others

Ulaa Enterprise provides a simplified user experience for both general employees and IT teams in the following ways: 

• Low IT Overhead: Ulaa does not require heavy virtualization or complex infrastructure. Deployment is straightforward, management is lightweight, and policy changes propagate instantly without introducing performance overhead for end-users. 
• Intelligent Monitoring: Ulaa supports ethical, targeted security monitoring, without turning into invasive surveillance, to build employee trust. 
• Familiarity: Ulaa Enterprise combines Chromium’s familiarity with built-in security, ensuring a seamless experience while enforcing local security checks for speed and protection. 
• Cross-platform Support: Ulaa works across all major desktop and mobile platforms, including Android and iOS. 

The release of Ulaa Enterprise accompanies a period of tremendous growth for Ulaa, whose download numbers and monthly active user counts have increased by 2.5x since 2023.

Pricing and Availability

Ulaa Enterprise is currently available starting at $1/month per device or $10/year per device. For more information around pricing, please visit: http://ulaa.com/enterprise/pricing.

To request a demo, please visit: http://ulaa.com/enterprise/request-demo.

 Zoho Corporation, a global technology company, today announces the addition of 10 new services and features within Zoho Creator, the company’s low code application development platform. This news aligns with Zoho’s pledge to invest solely in AI capabilities that drive real-time, practical, and secure benefits to business users.

Zoho Creator’s new AI development partner, CoCreator, facilitates faster, simpler, and more intelligent app building with the use of voice and written prompts, process flows and business specification documents. Powered by Zia, Zoho’s AI assistant, CoCreator drives shorter go-to-market timeframes and democratizes app creation for users at diverse skill levels—all without requiring add-ons to a customer’s existing subscription.

Zia has been a bridge across the company’s full product suite, including Creator, since its launch in 2015. As artificial intelligence finds greater utilization in a business’s day-to-day operations, Zoho’s full ownership of its tech stack and deep AI integration provides customers with a higher level of contextual AI across all company workflows than competitors, allowing for a tool that understands your data and anticipates how it can be utilized. 

Creator’s new features are available today for all users, and include:  

• Idea-to-App Generation: Leverage capabilities of ZohoAI or OpenAI to develop full-fledged applications including contextual integrations, automations, permission sets and insightful dashboards. By using text or voice prompts, process flow diagrams, or systems documentations like software requirement specifications (SRS), Creator will provide domain-specific suggestions, ideas for relevant fields, and modules tailored to a customer’s business.
• Component generation using AI: Contextual component development enhances existing applications with prompt-based form generation. In addition, Zia proactively recommends contextual fields within an existing form, a feature missing in most similar low-code app development tools.
• Code generation and optimization: With Zia’s prompter, various developer personas can use prompts to automatically generate contextual code blocks tailored to application requirements and structure. This feature can also be used to optimize and annotate existing code blocks for ideal performance.
• Data cleansing and modelling: Quickly transform unstructured data from various file types and databases into customized apps, aided by advanced AI-based data prep capabilities that remove inconsistencies and bring logical structure to detail.
• AI Skills: Enables businesses to build apps with specialized skills that can interpret natural language instructions, analyze business context, and coordinate a chain of actions (powered by Deluge and specialized AI models) to intelligently automate everyday processes. Feature currently available in Early Access only, set to launch in General Availability in June 2025.
• Deploy a custom AI modelwith context-specific data to meet specific requirements, with support for custom models for OCR, prediction, and object detection.

Zoho Artificial Intelligence Differentiation

Zoho is committed to designing and incorporating artificial intelligence guided by the principles of customer privacy and value. Our generic AI models across contextual, assistive, and agentic AI, are not trained on consumer data and do not retain customer information. Zoho builds AI tools with usefulness in mind, striking a balance between providing AI technology that assists workers while right-sizing models that don’t require burdening consumers with additional costs.