Chennai, Sep 23 Homegrown software company Zoho on Wednesday launched Zia Chat, a unified AI interface for businesses, and announced its entry into vertical SaaS with seven industry-specific applications spanning retail, automotive, BFSI, healthcare, education, real estate and restaurants.
Zia Chat is built natively into Zoho’s ecosystem and gives users a single conversational interface to find information, generate leads, resolve support issues and analyse data across sales, marketing, support, HR and finance functions, the company said.
“Our goal is to commoditise intelligence so customers can get work done, without incurring high costs on tokens,” Sridhar Vembu, Chief Scientist and Co-founder, Zoho, said at a briefing. Zia Chat will reduce token consumption for users, and will be available for early access in a month, initially in English.
“There is an interface crisis, and people spend too much time searching for the right context and data. We strip away the UIs (user interfaces) of different applications and give employees a single, unified AI interface across the business,” he added.
The launch comes at a time when Zoho has gained prominence as the face of India’s ‘Swadeshi’ software push.
Vembu, who was conferred the Padma Shri in 2021 has positioned Zoho as a homegrown alternative to global majors such as Microsoft and Google.
Vembu said fragmented business context limits AI’s understanding of an organisation, and Zia Chat addresses this by pulling together information, workflows and industry-specific rules onto one platform.
According to the company, Zia Chat can summarise records and conversations, analyse business data and convert it into reports, charts, spreadsheets and presentations, besides drafting emails, assigning tasks and scheduling recurring reports, all within a single conversation.
Users can also switch between role-based “Profiles” and delegate multi-step work to “Zia Agents”.
The tool is model-agnostic, letting organisations choose their preferred AI models, and is extensible to external systems through MCP integrations, while respecting existing enterprise permissions and approval workflows, the company said.
It added that responses can be traced back to underlying records, and data accessed by Zia Chat is not used to train Zoho’s AI models.
Alongside Zia Chat, Zoho announced its foray into vertical SaaS, launching sector-specific products, including Zoho RetailIQ, a CRM for physical retail businesses; Zoho AutoDMS for automotive dealership management; and Zoho LOS, a loan origination system for banks, NBFCs and insurers covering the lending journey from application to disbursement.
In healthcare, the company launched MedScribe, an AI-native clinical documentation tool that is compliant with India’s Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission that converts doctor-patient conversations into structured records.
For education, Zoho Campus, launching first in India, will bring admissions, fee collection, attendance and timetabling onto a single platform. The company also introduced a real estate platform to manage the property sales cycle from lead capture to deal closure, and Zoho POS for Restaurants, which will be free for businesses billing up to Rs 12 lakh annually.
The announcements come as Zoho’s India revenue grew 45 per cent year-on-year in 2025, driven by Zoho Workplace, Zoho One, Zoho CRM, Zoho Books and Zoho People, with strong traction in ITeS, manufacturing, BFSI, professional services, retail and automotive sectors.
Zoho, privately held and profitable, employs over 19,000 people and serves more than 150 million users globally across data centres it owns and operates.
(PTI News)
