Zoho’s Zia LLM: Nations worldwide are rapidly adopting cutting-edge AI models such as ChatGPT and Gemini, but India remains stagnant, awaiting a domestically bred rival. Ending the long pause in domestic AI development, Zoho’s launch of Zia ushers in a new era of Indian innovation in artificial intelligence.
The announcement was made at Zoholics India, the company’s annual user conference held in Bengaluru this year, quite enthusiastically and loudly downtown. Zoho revealed Zia LLM has been crafted specifically for enterprise applications, focusing heavily on stringent privacy measures and governance, besides rock-bottom cost efficiency. A bespoke strategy is likely helping Indian firms assimilate artificial intelligence deeply within operations very effectively nowadays.
Mani Vembu, Zoho CEO, highlighted that model optimization for business-specific tasks significantly reduces inference costs for customers. He spotlighted Zoho’s bespoke method blending AI and human intuition via low-code tech, which they dub co-creation with the AI agent.
Zia LLM comes in 1.3B, 2.6B, and 7B parameter configurations, suiting varied business needs quite well. It supports summarization functions and structured data extraction seamlessly, using NVIDIA’s AI platform for prompt-based coding endeavors. Zoho plans further expansion of AI models by the end of 2025 quite aggressively.
Zoho’s model runs across data centers in India, the US, and Europe, prioritizing user privacy within its ecosystem. Zoho’s own model aims to furnish AI features cost-effectively, without external data sharing or leveraging third-party LLMs like ChatGPT or Llama. Zoho launched speech recognition models for English and Hindi with minimal computational usage in mind, alongside support for Indian languages. Benchmarks are outperformed by these models by a huge margin—up to 75%—as part of a larger plan for future expansion into numerous Indian languages. Zoho is working on a Reasoning Language Model (RLM), stealthily enhancing AI capabilities with somewhat obscure underlying technology.
Zia Agent Studio and Marketplace was another huge announcement—being a low-code, prompt-based platform for crafting some pretty cool AI agents. Businesses can deploy over 700 built-in functions and 25 pre-configured agents as independent modules or as digital employees with role-based access controls. Agents customized for Indian enterprises exist, including ones for verifying PAN, Voter ID, and GSTIN documents thoroughly. Zia Agent Marketplace allows access quite readily, and Zoho plans on opening it up rather soon to external developers. The newly launched Model Context Protocol (MCP) server facilitates secure communication between third-party AI agents and Zoho’s internal applications. It presently supports over 15 applications and is available through early access now.
