Zoho launches large language model Zia LLM, deepens AI offerings

In a statement, the Chennai-based company announced the successful launch of its own large language model, Zia LLM, which was built completely in-house by leveraging NVIDIA's AI-accelerated computing platform.

Trained with Zoho product use cases in mind--ranging from structured data extraction, summarisation, RAG, and code generation--Zia LLM is comprised of three models with 1.3 billion, 2.6 billion and 7 billion parameters, each separately trained and optimised for contextual applicability that benchmark competitively against comparable open source models in the market.

"Today's announcement emphasises Zoho's longstanding aim to build foundational technology focused on protection of customer data, breadth and depth of capabilities, and value," said Mani Vembu, CEO at Zoho.

"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," the CEO added in the statement.

Further, it has announced two completely "home-grown" automatic speech-to-text models for English and Hindi, aimed at optimising performance with high accuracy in relatively modest hardware.

"We will support other Indian languages over time," Zoho's Chief Scientist Shridhar Vembu wrote on X.

Optimised to perform efficiently on low computer loads without compromising accuracy, the models benchmark up to 75 per cent better than comparable models across standard tests, according to the Zoho statement.

"While Zoho supports many LLM integrations for users, including ChatGPT, Llama, and DeepSeek, Zia LLM continues Zoho's commitment to data privacy by allowing customers to keep their data on Zoho servers, leveraging the latest AI capabilities without sending their data to AI cloud providers," the statement added.

Zia LLM will be deployed across Zoho's data centres in the US, India, and Europe. The model is currently testing for internal use cases across Zoho's broad app portfolio and will be available for customer use in the coming months.

First announced earlier in 2025, Zoho has further simplified the Zia Agent Studio experience to be fully prompt-based (with the option to use low-code) and include ready-made access to over 700 actions across Zoho's products.

In another offering, Zoho has adopted the Model-View-Controller (MVC) model, offering its own MVC server with a rich action library across several applications.

With over 55 apps in nearly every major business category, Zoho Corporation is one of the world's technology leaders.

Headquartered in Austin, Texas, with international headquarters in Chennai, India, Zoho is a privately held and profitable company with over 18,000 employees. (ANI)