Zoho has jumped into the AI race with its first proprietary large language model (LLM) that is designed for enterprise use cases such as structured data extraction, summarisation, code generation, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG).
Zia LLM was built completely in-house by leveraging NVIDIA’s AI accelerated computing platform, the enterprise software company said in a press release on Thursday, July 17. The LLM is made up of three underlying base models in varying sizes: 1.3 billion, 2.6 billion, and 7 billion parameters. The parameter count of an AI model reflects its capacity to learn and generate complex responses.
Each of the models were “separately trained” and “optimised for contextual applicability that benchmark competitively against comparable open source models in the market,” as per Zoho.
Our big AI announcement today.
First, Zia LLM with 3 completely home-grown models with 1.3 billion, 2.6 billion and 7 billion parameters, that focus on various business use cases.
Second, two completely home grown automatic speech to text models for English and Hindi, optimised…
— Sridhar Vembu (@svembu) July 17, 2025
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The move comes months after the company abandoned its $700 million plan to foray into chip manufacturing after struggling to find the right technology partner to aid in the complex chip-making processes. It also comes at a time when the Indian government is looking to develop a domestic LLM of its own. The IT Ministry has short-listed four startups, Sarvam AI, Soket AI Labs, Gnani.ai and Gan.ai, to build a foundational AI model under the Rs 10,300 crore-IndiaAI mission.
“Today’s announcement emphasizes Zoho’s longstanding aim to build foundational technology focused on protection of customer data, breadth and depth of capabilities, and value. Because Zoho’s AI initiatives are developed internally, we are able to provide customers with cutting-edge tool sets without compromising data privacy and organisational flexibility, democratising the latest technology on a global scale,” Mani Vembu, CEO of Zoho, said in a statement.
Zia LLM is currently undergoing internal testing and will be available to customers in the coming months. It will be deployed across Zoho’s data centres in the US, India, and Europe, the company said. It has not revealed the pricing of these AI offerings.
AI agents, speech-to-text models
Aside from its in-house LLM, Zoho also announced it has developed two new Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models capable of converting speech to text using AI. It currently only works for English and Hindi, with support for additional languages coming in the future.
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In terms of performance, Zoho said that the ASR models scored 75 per cent better than comparable models across standard benchmarks. It also said the data of customers using Zia LLM will be stored on Zoho servers and will not be sent to external AI cloud providers.
Zoho is further rolling out over 25 ready-to-deploy AI-powered agents capable of undertaking various business activities and handling relevant actions related to sales development, customer support, account management, revenue growth, deal analysis, and candidate screening.
These pre-built AI agents can be deployed by customers using Zoho’s Agent Marketplace. It has also upgraded its AI agent building platform called Zia Agent Studio, launched earlier this year, to include ready-made access to over 700 actions across Zoho’s products. In addition, Zoho has adopted the model context protocol (MCP) which lets customers tap into third-party AI agents as well.
Moving forward, Zoho plans to develop an AI reasoning model along with expanding the available languages used by its speech-to-text models.
