Zoho has just made its SaaS suite smarter, not merely wiser.

The enterprise tech major has designed an ambitious artificial intelligence (AI) suite based on its in-house large language model (LLM), Zia, which includes a no-code agent builder, customisable AI assistants, and automatic speech recognition (ASR) models for English and Hindi.

“It will help businesses we serve more seamlessly integrated and function more efficiently,” CEO Mani Vembu claimed after rolling out the stack at Zoholics India, the company’s annual user conference, in Bengaluru in July.

Most enterprises are content integrating third-party foundation models, or relying on open-source alternatives. Zoho took the road less travelled by building its own family of small, domain-specific LLMs entirely in-house.

“It’s not just about our technological prowess, it signals our long-standing playbook of vertical integration, tight control over data and infrastructure, and a deliberate focus on cost-efficiency and privacy,” Vembu said.

Zoho has tailored the LLM model for specific business use cases. Built on NVIDIA’s accelerated computing platform, Zia LLM powers use cases like data extraction, summarisation, code generation, and task automation.

The Zia family consists of compact, domain-specific models, trained between 1.3 Bn and 7 Bn parameters, and embedded deep inside Zoho’s enterprise SaaS stack.

“We felt that in certain use cases, we could be more efficient,” said Vembu. “We trained each of these models – 1.3 Bn, 2.6 Bn, and 7 Bn – for specific scenarios. This allows us to choose the right model for each task, which brings significant efficiency benefits.”

An Extension Of Zoho, Not A Pivot

Zoho is not tempted to tag itself AI-first. “We’re not moving away from our SaaS roots,” affirmed Vembu. We’re simply building a layer of intelligence on top of what we’ve........

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