Global technology company Zoho has unveiled a new wave of agentic AI capabilities, expanding free access to advanced AI tools across its collaboration, customer experience, and HR platforms. The move reinforces Zoho’s commitment to making artificial intelligence practical, affordable, and accessible for businesses throughout Africa.
The rollout builds on the company’s long-term AI vision, centered around Zia, Zoho’s proprietary assistant, and Zia LLM, a large language model designed specifically for business applications. Together with Zia Hubs—a system enabling AI access to unstructured company data—these form the backbone of Zoho’s agentic AI ecosystem, driving automation and actionable insights across its suite of 55+ integrated applications.
Democratizing AI for African Businesses
“Businesses are increasingly eager to leverage AI but often face obstacles such as high implementation costs, data readiness challenges, and fragmented systems,” said Andrew Bourne, Regional Head of Zoho South Africa.
“Zoho’s unified, homegrown technology stack eliminates these barriers by allowing advanced AI features to be deployed automatically and at no extra cost. Our customers don’t need to invest in third-party integrations or additional tools—the technology simply arrives and works.”
The new agentic AI architecture helps companies automate routine operations—from data entry and communication to recruitment and customer support—allowing teams to focus on higher-value work and strategic decision-making.
Expanding Capabilities Across Core Business Functions
Zoho’s latest upgrades extend to collaboration, customer service, and HR, equipping African enterprises with end-to-end intelligent workflows.
1. Collaboration & Productivity (Zoho Workplace)
- The Ask Zia assistant can now handle multi-step, cross-app commands such as drafting emails, scheduling meetings, and analyzing spreadsheets simultaneously.
- Zoho Tables introduces AI Base Creation, where users can generate structured databases from a simple text prompt.
- Other upgrades—like Keyword Extraction, Sentiment Analysis, and Language Detection—simplify data organization and improve communication analytics.
2. Customer Experience (Zoho Desk, Zoho Sign)
- Zoho Desk, used by over 100,000 businesses globally, adds Zia Resolution Expert, which learns from past support tickets to improve future case handling.
- Zoho Sign launches Agreement Intelligence, enabling users to draft, review, and query contracts directly using Ask Zia, eliminating the need for external software.
3. Human Resources (Zoho Recruit)
- Zia Candidate and Job Match analyzes CVs and job descriptions for better candidate alignment.
- AI-Assisted Assessment Generation automatically creates customized evaluations for each role—accelerating recruitment and ensuring fairness.
Agentic AI: The Next Step in Automation
The newly launched features build on Zoho’s Zia Agents, Zia Agent Studio, and Agent Marketplace, empowering users to automate complex actions across workflows—for instance, generating legal contracts from multiple documents or converting sales queries into CRM leads without manual effort.
This agentic approach, which gives AI systems autonomy to act on context and intent, is a major milestone in Zoho’s global AI roadmap. By integrating these capabilities into its existing platform, Zoho aims to help African businesses boost productivity, reduce costs, and scale efficiently—without needing external AI providers or high technical expertise.
A Scalable Future for AI in Africa
Zoho’s latest announcement positions it as a key enabler of inclusive AI adoption on the continent, where many small and mid-sized businesses are eager to digitize but face resource constraints. By embedding agentic AI directly into its applications, Zoho offers a plug-and-play model that aligns with Africa’s growing appetite for intelligent, affordable business solutions.
“This approach makes AI adoption practical, affordable, and impactful for businesses across the continent,” Bourne emphasized.
As Africa’s digital transformation accelerates, Zoho’s expanded AI suite could redefine how companies across sectors—from finance and retail to logistics and HR—work smarter, faster, and more humanely in the age of automation.
