Zoho Analyst Day 2025 - From Apps To Platform

Zoho’s analyst event in Austin, TX showcased Zoho’s efforts to become more of an enterprise platform player, going beyond its small- and mid-sized business (SMB) roots. As you might have noticed from my previous articles about Zoho (and this one), they’re a unique company that is “Privately Held, Publicly Responsible.” Zoho’s core values are:

• Financial prudence

• Customer focus

• Social conscience

This is clear in everything that Zoho does – they don’t just talk the talk, but Zoho walks the walk, as they say.

AI in the After DeepSeek Era

Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu kicked off the event focusing on AI, which of course was discussed throughout the event. Vembu recently stepped down as company CEO to become Zoho’s Chief Scientist, allowing him to focus focus full time on R&D initiatives, as well as his personal passion for rural development. In his keynote, Vembu discussed “Hallucinations of 2024 vs. Reality of 2025, as we move from the BC era (Big Capex) to the AD era (After DeepSeek). He explained that AI features are mere table stakes, and that companies’ specific business data and context, combined with commodity reasoning engines, is what delivers business value.

Vembu noted that the new source of value in enterprise software is privacy, trust, and compliance, based on the three stages of AI:

1. Enhancing user experience with AI using contextual business data

2. AI enabled verifiable actions (agents)

3. Massive programmer productivity

And of course Zoho’s big announcement was around AI, with an expansion of Zoho’s AI platform, Zia. Zoho introduced the new Zia Agent, Agent Studio, and Agent Marketplace, which enabling enterprises to build, deploy, and access autonomous digital agents across their organizations. Zoho released several pre-built Zia Agents, including an Account Manager Agent, SDR Agent, HR Agent, Customer Support Agent, IT Help Desk Agent, and a Sales Coach Agent, with more on the way. With pre-built agents, customers can get up and running more quickly, making it easier to deploy AI for various workflows and processes.

Customers and partners that want to create their own customized agents can use the no-code and low-code Zia Agent Studio. These agents can be published in the Agent Marketplace, where customers can access and deploy other pre-built agents.

Zoho also enhanced Ask Zia, a conversational assistant for employees (basically Zoho’s version of a copilot) that will be contextually embedded across all Zoho applications.

To enable integration with various public and self-hosted LLMs, Zoho AI Bridge makes it easy to connect to third-party LLMs such as Meta, DeepSeek, Mistral AI, OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere, Google, etc.

From Apps to Platform

Mani Vembu, Zoho’s new Chief Executive Officer, gave an insightful presentation on Zoho’s vision to evolve beyond being a product company to becoming the preferred platform vendor as a foundation for innovation, collaboration, and transformation. Vembu explained the value of being a domain-specific app platform, which is the balance between too much abstraction in all-in-one platform and fully out-of-the-box point products. By combining the power of domain-specific features with low-code tools and contextual coding to extend the platform, and leveraging its composable architecture, Zoho can create business impact with shorter implementation cycles with quicker change management capabilities for enterprises.

Zoho now has several domain specific app platforms, including:

• Customer experience platform

• Collaboration platform

• Employee experience platform

• Finance platform

• IoT platform

• ITSM platform

Zoho’s apps and app platforms all run on the same infrastructure and leverage Zoho’s unified data platform.

CX, Collaboration, and More…

It was great hearing about Zoho’s vision, differentiation, AI strategy, and more, but I wanted to hear about what they’re doing in collaboration and CX.

In this video interview Rakeeb Rafeeque discusses two of my favorite Zoho products - Zoho Voice and Zoho Cliq. Rafeeque provides insights into new capabilities, as well as how these products are being enhanced for enterprise customers.

I also spoke with Aarthie Elizabeth, Senior Marketing Manager, about what Zoho is doing in the collaboration space. The good news is that there’ll be a big announcement in March – but the bad news is that it’s confidential for now. In this video interview, Elizabeth discusses Zoho Project Management, with a peak into what’s to come.

Hearing From Customers

As always, we heard from many Zoho customers, and I had a chance to speak with several of them during the event, including Nuvia Smiles “Chief Nerd,” Parl Johnson.

In this video interview. Aarthie Elizabeth discusses what’s new with Zoho Workdrive, while Shanthana Lakshmi, Senior Product Marketing Analyst, gives an update on Zoho Cliq, and Nuvia Smiles’ Johnson discusses how the dental implant company uses these products.

Conclusion

As noted, Zoho isn’t your typical business communications vendor – and that’s a good thing. The company’s focus on giving back to the community, providing value to customers, and continual innovation helps separate them from the pack. It will be interesting to see how well Zoho succeeds moving up the enterprise stack, as this entails various challenges along the way. Based on what I know about the company, Zoho is ready to face these challenges and thrive.