Zoho Corporation, one of the world’s most prolific technology companies, is signalling a significant commitment to Malaysia, a market poised for explosive growth in the Software as a Service (SaaS) sector. The country’s SaaS market is projected to reach approximately USD 2.36 billion by 2030. Building on strong local momentum, demonstrated by a 22% annual revenue growth in 2024, Zoho recently hosted its flagship Zoholics user conference to unveil next-generation AI solutions designed specifically to meet this burgeoning demand from enterprises. This market investment is underscored by a focus on accessible, integrated, and AI-driven software that empowers businesses of all sizes.
Zia LLM: The Privacy-First Model Architecture
At the heart of Zoho’s strategy is its unique approach to artificial intelligence, which prioritises customer privacy and control. The company operates its own data centers and commits that its generic AI models are not trained on consumer data. This commitment materialised with the introduction of Zia LLM, a large language model built completely in-house using NVIDIA’s AI-accelerated computing platform.
Technically, the Zia LLM is architected not as a single model, but as a suite of three specialised models featuring 1.3 billion, 2.6 billion, and 7 billion parameters. This is Zoho’s “right-sizing” strategy, allowing them to optimise the right model for the right user context, thereby striking the proper balance between raw power and efficient resource management. These models are trained specifically for business use cases—ranging from structured data extraction, summarisation, and code generation—and critically, allow customers to leverage the latest AI capabilities without sending their sensitive data to external AI cloud providers.
Zia Hubs: Unlocking the Enterprise’s Unstructured Data
Complementing the Zia LLM is Zia Hubs, a new solution introduced within the Zoho WorkDrive file management tool for teams. Zia Hubs is engineered to tackle one of the biggest challenges in enterprise AI: utilising the vast amounts of organisational unstructured business data that sits outside traditional databases. The Hubs expose content—including documents, PDFs, videos, and audio files—to Zoho’s comprehensive AI services. This unification of content formats is pivotal, as it lays the groundwork for intelligent agents to act contextually and accurately on content across the company’s entire product suite, providing comprehensive analysis and unified search capabilities.
CRM for Everyone: The AI-Powered Central Nervous System
The AI foundations provided by the Zia LLM and Zia Hubs dramatically enhance the user experience across Zoho’s core offering, most notably in the upgraded CRM for Everyone platform. Zoho is positioning the CRM not just as a sales solution, but as the “central nervous system” of modern business, empowering every department from marketing to HR to customer support to work smarter and more collaboratively.
The deeper integration of the Zia AI engine unlocks powerful agentic capabilities that streamline complex operations. For instance, features like Workflow Creation with Ask Zia allow users to build custom workflows using simple plain text prompts. Similarly, Report Creation with Ask Zia enables users to prompt the AI to build reports on their behalf with real-time visualisation. Furthermore, the addition of orchestration tools like Connected Records automatically links work across team modules to ensure the smooth flow of context through the customer journey, while Connected Workflows coordinates work across multiple teams involved in delivering the final customer experience.
Availability
The enhanced CRM for Everyone platform is now available in Malaysia.
The rollout of the new AI-centric tools will follow shortly. Zia Hubs is scheduled for release later this quarter. The core Zia LLM is currently undergoing internal testing across Zoho’s broad app portfolio and will be available for customer use in the coming months. The model will be strategically deployed across Zoho’s data centres in the US, India, and Europe.
