Zoho’s Zia LLM: Made in India, Built for Enterprise AI

Home » Blog » Zoho’s Zia LLM: Made in India, Built for Enterprise AI

What if your enterprise AI could be powerful, private, and fully under your control—without depending on Big Tech? Zoho is turning that vision into reality with its latest innovation: Zia LLM.

Zoho introduces Zia LLM, a homegrown, enterprise-grade large language model designed for privacy, performance, and complete control. Built in India, trusted worldwide. Zoho Corporation, a leading global SaaS provider, has made a groundbreaking leap in artificial intelligence with the launch of Zia LLM, its proprietary large language model. Purpose-built to meet enterprise AI needs, Zia LLM is integrated with a next-generation suite of AI agents and a robust AI agent marketplace. This strategic move enhances business automation, improves operational efficiency, and ensures data privacy—hallmarks of Zoho’s trusted ecosystem. By leveraging its in-house AI capabilities, Zoho empowers businesses to streamline processes, make smarter decisions, and stay competitive in the evolving digital landscape.

The Making of Zia LLM

Technical Foundation

Proprietary and In-House: Zia LLM is exclusively created, trained, and tuned by Zoho without the need for external or third-party LLMs—raising security and transparency.

Model Architecture: Available in three parameter sizes of 1.3 billion, 2.6 billion, and 7 billion, the models are specifically made for contextual business insight. This “right-sized” treatment maximizes for diverse enterprise applications, finding the right balance between power and computational costs.

Training and Hardware: The 7 billion parameter flagship model was trained for 50 days on 128 Nvidia H100 GPUs, utilizing a combination of public and proprietary data sets. Zoho’s production models, importantly, run entirely within the company’s private data centers—specifically located in the US, India, and Europe. Consequently, this ensures greater control, enhanced security, and full compliance with regional data regulations.

Business and Technical Focus

Enterprise-Grade Performance: Zoho has benchmarked Zia LLM to outperform leading open-source models like LLaMA 2–7B and even the competitive LLaMA 3–8B, especially on customer tasks relevant to enterprise needs.

Use-Case Alignment: Zoho trains Zia LLM to focus on organized data extraction, summarization, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), email composition, report generation, and more—delivering fine-tuned intelligence tailored for business use.

Privacy-First Design

One of the major differences at Zoho is its absolute focus on customer privacy:

Data Sovereignty: Zoho processes and stores all data exclusively within its own environment. It never uses customer data to train or fine-tune Zia LLM, ensuring that businesses maintain full control and access at all times.

Non-Retention of Customer Data: In contrast to most consumer-focused AI solutions, Zoho’s AI models neither retain nor repurpose organizational data; instead, they use it solely for immediate operations, thereby ensuring enhanced privacy and responsible usage.

Compliant by Design: By controlling its own infrastructure and deliberately avoiding third-party cloud LLM vendors, Zoho positions itself as the ideal choice for privacy-conscious industries such as finance, healthcare, and government.

Broadening the AI Portfolio: Zia Agents and Agent Marketplace

Agent Studio: Zoho’s no-code/low-code platform empowers both technical and non-technical users to create, train, and deploy custom agents using natural language instructions. Moreover, users can structure these agents to operate either independently or hierarchically, enabling advanced and scalable workflows.

Operational Impact: Zia Agents perform mundane tasks, process structured and unstructured information, classify customer inquiries, raise alerts on anomalies, and streamline multi-step business processes.

Agent Marketplace

Plug-and-Play Solutions: Zoho’s Agent Marketplace has more than 25 out-of-the-box agents that are ready to deploy, with the list growing every month. Organizations can deploy the out-of-the-box agents or make use of their own creations, creating a collaborative marketplace.

Ecosystem Integration: The agents, notably, can communicate seamlessly across Zoho’s extensive suite of over 100 business applications. Furthermore, through deep workflow integration and real-time access to operational data, they enable advanced automation. As a result, enterprises of all sizes benefit from smarter, faster, and more connected business processes.

Future-Proofing: Plans involve extending agent abilities, language support (which includes Indic and European languages), and supporting third-party integrations for even more flexibility.

Economic and Competitive Strengths

Cost and Energy Efficiency: By using right-sized models and, moreover, managing its own AI stack, Zoho significantly reduces inference costs and optimizes power consumption. As a result, these efficiencies directly translate into cost savings for end-users; consequently, sophisticated AI becomes both accessible and affordable for businesses across the globe.

Strategic Control: Complete control of the AI infrastructure, therefore, enables Zoho to continuously tailor its systems, regularly conduct security assessments, and swiftly respond to evolving market demands. Consequently, this strategic advantage places Zoho well ahead of competitors who, by contrast, rely on static, generic third-party models.

Democratizing AI: The launch of low-code software and agent marketplace models, notably, accelerates Zoho’s mission; as a result, it democratizes next-generation AI and, consequently, empowers businesses of all sizes to automate processes, drive innovation, and compete effectively at scale.

Real-World Impact and Future Roadmap

Deployments Today: Zia LLM is already powering capabilities in Zoho CRM, such as record summarization, report generation, and intelligent sales insights. The model is now accessible to enterprise and ultimate-tier US customers, with global deployments in progress.

Multi-Functional Agents: Zia Agents are reshaping sales prospecting, customer care, HR onboarding, inventory management, data cleansing, and even healthcare workflows—showcasing versatility across industries.

Long-Term Vision: Zoho aims to enhance Zia LLM with larger models, RLM, and smarter agents by 2025 and beyond.

Conclusion

Zoho’s Zia LLM and its agents’ ecosystem and marketplace represent an important milestone—not only for Zoho, but also for the enterprise AI ecosystem overall. By combining privacy-first architecture, right-sized models, and deeply integrated automation tools, Zoho is enabling organizations globally to unlock the power of AI effectively, securely, and at scale.

“Our LLM model is trained specifically for business use cases, keeping privacy and governance at its core, which has resulted in lowering the inference cost, passing on that value to the customers, while also ensuring that they are able to utilise AI productively and efficiently.”- Mani Vembu, CEO of Zoho.