Zoho Integrates OpenAI with Zia, Strengthening Generative AI Capabilities While Upholding Core Tenets of AI Strategy

The Integration of Generative AI Technology with Zoho’s Homegrown AI, Zia, Reinforces Customer Experience, Privacy, and Value

Zoho Corporation, a leading global technology company, today announced execution plans and ongoing investment in AI, beginning with the launch of 13 generative AI Zoho application extensions and integrations, powered by ChatGPT. Generative AI is the latest step along the company’s innovation roadmap, blending third-party intelligence with Zia, Zoho’s powerful AI engine, which runs on Zoho’s secure cloud. Leveraging Zoho’s decade-long investment in AI, this integration model greatly improves customer experience, adds considerable customer value, and better protects user privacy.

“The fusion of ChatGPT’s generative AI with our homegrown AI features will provide users with a more intuitive, efficient, and secure experience, reflecting Zoho’s deep R&D-first culture,” said Ramprakash Ramamoorthy, Head of Labs and AI Research for Zoho. “As a technology partner, Zoho’s customers continue to rely on us for keeping them ahead of the curve while retaining core tenets like privacy and value, which they have come to respect. We will continue to deliver on this promise without compromise.”

The following are the three core tenets of Zoho’s AI strategy:

• Customer Experience: Zoho’s AI solutions deliver the context, intelligence, and efficiency necessary to produce exemplary experience. Zia is woven into the fabric of each step, be it enhancing customer records, producing documents, providing insights into processes or proactively forecasting, and preparing for user issues that might arise.
• Customer Privacy: Zoho builds its AI in-house, resulting in optimal privacy protection that effortlessly unifies with users’ greater technology ecosystems. Tools powered by Zoho’s AI extensions deliver intelligence without compromising customer data or sending information to an unverified third party. Examples include handwriting detection, phishing protection, communication translation, and more.
• Customer Value: Zoho delivers multifaceted value in the form of customer productivity, ease of use, cost, relevant KPIs, and making AI widely available to a broad set of people. Any piece of technology that saves customers time will become a priority for Zoho, and AI is no exception.

Marketing Technology News: What is Personal Branding — And How You Can Get Started Now

AI Roadmap and Vision

In the short term, Zoho will facilitate Zia’s integration with third-party intelligence, as it has done with ChatGPT, bringing the newest technology into the company’s broad portfolio of business solutions. As Zoho progresses, the company intends to take generative AI technology in-house, ensuring its 90 million global users benefit from intelligent experiences as well as Zoho’s leading value and privacy standards. In addition, Zoho is currently developing proprietary Large Language Models (LLMs) capable of conversing, summarizing, paraphrasing, and adapting to new tasks with zero-shot learning techniques, empowering seamless AI-driven communication and knowledge discovery like never before.

Generative AI in Zoho Applications

Zoho’s new generative AI integrations, powered by ChatGPT, complement the broad portfolio of AI technologies Zoho already supports. This new technology has been contextually integrated into Zoho’s applications and can be leveraged right away by users of all stripes. Here’s what ChatGPT is facilitating right now:

Zoho CRM with Generative AI

• Extract and summarize key information from customer records
• Offer predictive analysis on deals in progress
• Create personalized emails and custom templates from scratch
• Check content for grammatical errors

Zoho Analytics with Generative AI

• Receive suggestions and import public datasets into Zoho Analytics
• Blend public data with business data to gather insights
• Define formulas for KPI metrics
• Create SQL queries from your questions in natural language
• Create a set of synonyms for table column names

Zoho Desk with Generative AI

• Automatically summarize incoming and outgoing tickets
• Analyze mood of customer based on tone of request
• Generate automatic replies from knowledge base articles
• If not enough knowledge base pieces available, track down publicly available information for solutions

Zoho Writer with Generative AI

• Suggest headlines, titles, and better word replacements
• Fix punctuation and shorten content, when necessary
• Ask questions within Writer and integrate answers into document

Zoho Mail with Generative AI

• Create emails from scratch
• Respond to incoming emails
• Generate multiple versions and change tone
• Produce email summaries
• Highlight action items from email

Zoho Cliq with Generative AI

• Maintain anytime access to ChatGPT from within messages
• Paraphrase incoming messages for faster responses and analysis
• Transform message threads into shareable outlines
• Shorten or summarize responses to clarify communication

Zoho Social with Generative AI

• Aid in producing diverse and engaging content for posts from trending topics
• Iterate on style of post to identify the best way to present information
• Suggest relevant supporting content and images to be sourced from media libraries or uniquely generated
• Optimize existing posts by adding hashtags, removing superfluous words, and implementing SEO best practices

Zoho Assist with Generative AI

• Generate shareable summaries from sessions, events, chats, and audio calls, including accompanying statistics
• Enhance customer service with automatic chat suggestions for technicians and representatives
• Modify existing text by rephrasing, translating, or reformatting

Zoho LandingPage with Generative AI

• Generate alternative content
• Generate suggestions for text type, tone, and character limit for landing pages
• Create multiple versions of a single landing page for easier A/B testing

Zoho SalesIQ with Generative AI

• Transcribe and summarize conversations
• Automatically tag transcripts to enhance searchability and shareability
• Message Review
• ChatGPT Block in Zobot

Zoho Notebook with Generative AI

• Illustrate a custom image, based on any suggestion, to be used as a cover in Notebook
• Organize notes via automatic tagging and summarizing, or turn them into checklists
• Alongside Zoho Blue Pencil, receive grammar, spelling, and word choice suggestions to enhance writing on-the-fly

Zoho DataPrep with Generative AI

• Find external datasets
• Transform by example
• Formula suggester

Zoho Meeting with Generative AI

• Index session transcripts
• Generate and download effective keynotes

“Zoho is leading the way with its integration of OpenAI,” said Zoho customer Steven Gabbard, Founder of Contractor Foreman, provider of construction management software. “As the AI continues to improve, so will the ability for our team members to serve our customers by helping us work smarter, not harder.”

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview with Shelly Cohen, Head of Business Development, eCommerce, at Wix

Availability and Pricing

Zia is available by default in Zoho’s applications. Integrations for Zoho Desk, Cliq, and Writer are available in Zoho Marketplace (alongside 1,800+ extensions), while all other OpenAI integrations are available within their respective Zoho products, built to work in tandem with Zia. Customers choosing to enable generative AI capabilities within Zoho’s applications may do so using their existing OpenAI account API key. Based on the number of APIs used, customers will be billed directly by OpenAI. Zoho will maintain a steady rhythm announcing new generative AI extensions and integrations to its portfolio.

Zoho Privacy Pledge

Zoho respects user privacy and does not have an ad-revenue model in any part of its business, including its free products. The company owns and operates its data centers, ensuring complete oversight of customer data, privacy, and security. More than 90 million users around the world, across hundreds of thousands of companies, rely on Zoho everyday to run their businesses, including Zoho itself.