Zoho Launches In-House LLM, AI Agents to Optimize Efficiency, Reduce Costs

Zoho Corp has launched its proprietary large language model (LLM) and AI agents, aiming to optimize efficiency, reduce costs, and provide specialized business-centric AI solutions. The company's "right-sized" approach uses three distinct models with varying parameters for specific business applications, while also considering power consumption and bandwidth. Zoho is also introducing Zia Agents, a marketplace for pre-built and custom AI agents, and Zia MCP for interoperability with other LLMs.

Zoho Corp has announced significant advancements in its AI capabilities with the launch of Zia LLM, a proprietary large language model, and Zia Agents, a marketplace for pre-built and custom AI agents. The company aims to optimize efficiency, reduce costs, and provide specialized business-centric AI solutions.

Zia LLM is built from the ground up and leverages NVIDIA's AI accelerated computing platform. The model is comprised of three distinct models with 1.3 billion, 2.6 billion, and 7 billion parameters, each optimized for specific business applications. This "right-sized" approach ensures that the appropriate model is used for the right context, balancing power and resource management [1].

In addition to Zia LLM, Zoho has introduced two proprietary Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models for speech-to-text conversion in English and Hindi. These models are optimized for low computer load while maintaining high accuracy, outperforming comparable models by up to 75% [1].

Zia Agents is a marketplace that offers over 2500 reliable extensions and integrations, including AI agents. Some pre-built agents include the Revenue Growth Specialist, Deal Analyzer, and Candidate Screener. These agents can be deployed autonomously, triggered by button clicks or rule-based automation, or summoned within customer conversations [1].

Zoho has also adopted the model context protocol (MCP) to enhance interoperability with other LLMs. The MCP server allows any MCP client to tap into data and actions from various Zoho apps while respecting defined permission structures. This will enable Zia Agents to interact and collaborate with each other and with agents on other platforms [1].

Zoho's commitment to customer privacy and value is evident in its AI tools, which are not trained on consumer data and do not retain customer information. The company's AI models are designed to assist workers while right-sizing models to avoid burdening consumers with additional costs [1].

Zoho's new AI offerings are expected to be available to customers in the coming months, with general availability towards the end of 2025. The company will study usage patterns during the early access phase to inform pricing structures [1].

References:
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/zoho-launches-zia-llm-deepens-070100475.html