The application platform provider Zoho Corp. highlighted its presence within larger enterprises last week at the analyst-only ZohoDay25 summit in a remote location an hour from Austin in the Texas Hill Country, announcing a novel lightweight approach to agentic AI that mirrors Zoho’s flexible organizational structure and globally distributed user base.

As explained in my previous coverage of last year’s ZohoDay, no other technology company operates like Zoho. In a world of vendor consolidation, volatile valuations and equity capitalization, it has been able to play the long game, investing in a common infrastructure and application experience while growing talent in local economies around the world.

You would think that Chief Executive Sridhar Vembu stepping down to focus on research and development as chief scientist, in order for co-founder Shailesh Kumar Davey to take over as Zoho CEO, would be the biggest news coming out of the show. But all indications are that these management rotations won’t affect the constant flow of new products and larger enterprise customer wins.

Bringing agentic AI into trusted context

Vembu, back on stage as chief scientist, came out of the gate stating, “OpenAI is a mirage” and introducing its unique multi-agent autonomous AI approach that validates a leaner, more focused form of AI. This release seems like a harbinger for the disruptive open-source DeepSeek AI project out of China. “If Big Tech will own AI, then everyone else pays tribute,” Vembu said.

Zoho has been pioneering its own AI approach for several years, progressing from its early Zia assistant chatbots to a very sophisticated framework behind customer queries that can orchestrate their own specialized models alongside other self-hosted and large language models through an intelligent-assistant bridge.

It also introduced Zia Agent Studio, a no-code way for any Zoho customer to create agents. Just prompt it for use cases, provide instructions, pick actions, then have the agent use your own authorized data. Or just check out a prebuilt agent from its AI marketplace of about 1,500 prebuilt models (so far) that can either run like serverless functions or downloaded, and continue from there.

If you want to differentiate an AI model from its peers, start from the training data. Rather than looking into hundreds of millions of its own user records to train an LLM on, they instead set up a retrieval-augmented generation architecture that can in essence learn from forgettable data that comes and goes during system actions as each user queries out their own work, thereby following “chain of thought” reasoning to weight its inputs and output decisions.

The resulting ‘’machine-checkable inferences” of Zoho’s AI agents, whether expressed in readable text, on-screen workflows, or generated code form, are also functionally testable by AI. In essence, AI contextual testability provides instant sensory feedback to increase the agent’s autonomy, so humans need to step in less often.

Managing at enterprise scale with vertical focus

In previous years, we would meet a handful of Zoho power users from a company, or even a single Zoho Creator customer who sets up tooling for the rest of their team with simple but effective low-code apps. This year, we’re seeing billion-dollar revenue customers, with thousands of active Zoho suite users and millions of customer touchpoints.

To extend the enterprise push, Zoho is also organizing vertical-specific business units and application suites, for banking and finance, healthcare, consumer goods and other industries. An established company or a startup can build its own API-ready apps with AI agents and tools for servicing its own end customers.

For instance, a major automotive group in India built a new auto dealer management system for managing franchises, chatbot service appointments and inventory atop Zoho with the help of a systems integration partner. A window and door manufacturing and installation company linked its Zoho-powered customer site to Zillow for location marketing, and to Shopify for e-commerce execution.

The firm’s once-separately positioned and marketed ManageEngine offering has also grown into a juggernaut of its own, allowing large-scale companies to either complement or replace a sitewide suite of software-as-a-service management, information technology service management, observability, analytics, operations and security capabilities.

Ghalib Kassam, executive vice president and chief information officer at the Los Angeles Times, described how his publication switched site operations and analytics over to ManageEngine alongside Zoho CRM and Desk for support. That replaced once-massive license renewals with a much less expensive alternative that still meets the scalability needs of a vital news site serving millions of visitors and more than a half-million daily subscribers.

Continuing global investment in local economies

The most interesting aspect of Zoho is the way it manages business with its transnational yet localized structure. Though it still staffs much of its core development and administration work from its business development, partner enablement, customer service and support.

“We understand the subtleties of working with local customers,” said Zoho Chief Strategy Officer Vijay Sundaram. “They are sometimes surprised that we’ll bring a whole team out, it shows them that they matter and that they have our full attention. We never try to push customers for bigger deals with each engagement. Selling smaller deals and taking a long term approach to success helps us build trust with customers.”

On the talent side, Zoho’s educational efforts are a wonder to behold. By setting up training facilities and workshops in rural areas, it’s able to turn both young and old students, many who have never even touched a computer keyboard, into skilled Zoho implementers and custom app builders. Check out this inspiring video of these local transformations for yourself.

The Intellyx Take

There were too many interesting technology and practice advances to cover in this story, such as the fruition of last year’s CRM for All and Analytics for All initiatives to provide one customer-centric source of truth for business data, and seeing Zoho’s internet of things solutions being implemented for clouds of devices within large factories and farming operations.

Fundamentally, what sets Zoho apart from other software vendors is the way it does business. It is fluidly distributing leadership and team responsibilities, while continually adjusting technology investments across its global security and data network, so that resources flow wherever customer value can be realized.

Jason English is director and principal analyst at Intellyx. He wrote this article for SiliconANGLE. ©2025, Intellyx B.V. Intellyx is solely responsible for the content of this article, and no AI was used to generate this copy. At the time of writing, Zoho is an Intellyx subscriber, and it covered costs for the analyst to attend, a common industry practice.

Photo: Jason English