Artificial intelligence is moving fast, and the organizations that will benefit most are those building AI into the fabric of how they operate.
Zoho Corp. is a compelling example of what that looks like in practice.
Founded in 1996 and now serving more than 150 million users across 60+ products, Zoho has spent decades building software that touches nearly every corner of business needs — from sales and finance to HR, collaboration and more. Today, the company is doing something that relatively few software providers have managed: embedding AI as a foundation of its business.
A coherent platform, not a collection of pilots
One of the most common pitfalls in enterprise AI adoption is the “pilot trap.” Organizations run promising experiments that never scale because the underlying infrastructure wasn’t built to support them. Zoho has taken a different path, given its R&D-focused approach to building.
Rather than just implementing AI on top of existing products, Zoho has built its unified AI stack, which can be woven across its portfolio. This proprietary AI stack has been curated and strengthened from the ground up over the course of 14 years. At its core is Zia LLM, Zoho’s proprietary large language model trained specifically on business use cases: structured data extraction, summarization, retrieval-augmented generation and code generation. Zia LLM comes in three model sizes — 1.3 billion, 2.6 billion and 7 billion parameters — allowing Zoho to match the right model to the right task, balancing performance with efficiency.
This isn’t a one-off capability. Zia LLM runs across Zoho’s product suites, supported by infrastructure built on Dell PowerEdge XE-Series servers, NVIDIA accelerated computing and high-performance networking. That coherent foundation — servers, storage, networking and software working in concert — is what allows Zoho to move AI from the lab into production at scale across dozens of products and millions of users.
“AI has become integral across business functions and organization sizes. What will help businesses navigate this AI wave? Context is what separates the businesses moving fast from the ones still figuring it out, i.e., knowing where AI actually fits in your workflow and having the right infrastructure to support it. The Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA has helped us accelerate our AI model development, especially in terms of training and inference, by having cutting-edge hardware and software that work really well together,” says Ramprakash Ramamoorthy, director of AI research at Zoho Corp.
The shift to Agentic AI
For more than a decade, Zoho’s AI assistant Zia has evolved steadily, from proactive to prescriptive, generative and now into something more significant: agentic AI. The company has built an ecosystem that empowers users to leverage agentic capabilities through: Zia Agent Studio (for creating custom AI agents with text prompts), Zia Agents (pre-built agents) and Agent Marketplace (for accessing pre-built agents). These enable businesses to build, deploy and scale intelligent AI agents across their operations.
Zia Agents are autonomous bots capable of handling organizational roles, not just answering questions or surfacing data.
Think about what that means in practice. A Revenue Growth Specialist agent identifies upsell and cross-sell opportunities and recommends personalized outreach. A Deal Analyzer provides win probability scores, next best actions and follow-up suggestions. A payroll assistant helps employees with basic payroll queries instantly and escalates complex ones to HR. These aren’t dashboards or reports; they’re agents that act.
What makes this possible is the fact that Zoho modernized its full stack so agents can operate safely across many workflows and domains simultaneously. Zia Agent Studio gives users access to more than 700 actions across Zoho’s product ecosystem, the same tools Zoho’s own developers use, making it straightforward to build and deploy custom agents without deep technical expertise.
“Agents are going to be critical for digital businesses in the coming years because agents are what bridge the nature of LLMs to concrete enterprise information,” says Ramamoorthy.
Privacy and scale together
Scaling AI globally introduces real complexity, particularly around data privacy and sovereignty. Zoho operates across more than 150 countries, and its privacy-first approach means building infrastructure locally, hiring locally and ensuring that customer data stays where it’s supposed to.
This is where the coherence of the underlying platform matters again. By partnering with Dell Technologies and NVIDIA, Zoho can strike what Ramamoorthy describes as “a balance between performance, cost-efficiency, and compliance with our in-country data hosting commitments.” That’s not a trivial achievement; it’s the kind of outcome that only becomes possible when the infrastructure strategy and the AI strategy are designed together.
What other organizations can learn
Zoho’s story is a signal about where enterprise AI is heading. The organizations that will lead are those that have built the coherent, scalable foundation that lets AI agents act across workflows, domains and geographies without breaking down at the seams.
The question worth asking isn’t whether your organization is experimenting with AI. It’s whether your stack is ready for what AI is about to become.
Dell reported this
Source: www.dell.com
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