Zoholics 2026 | Biz Systems

Key takeaways

If you read nothing else

Zia Chat is now the front door to Zoho
One chat interface that reads across CRM, Desk, Books, Mail, Cliq and Analytics, respects your permissions, and hands work off to specialist agents.
No price hikes, even with server costs up 3 to 4×
Sridhar Vembu said Zoho is absorbing a ~500% jump in memory prices through internal productivity instead of raising prices.
Vertical SaaS is Zoho's answer to vibe-coding
The stated test: custom software from Zoho should be cheaper than building and hosting it yourself with AI.
"Every AI project is a data project in disguise"
Repeated all day. AI works only when the apps underneath are connected, which is the case Zoho makes for Zoho One.
Clean core: keep the ERP pristine, build around it
SAP stays for what SAP does; approvals, portals and shop-floor apps move to Creator. The Hindware group built about 50 satellite apps in a year.
Creator is no longer "low-code"
It is now an AI development platform: prompt → requirements doc → working app. You can also edit Creator apps from Claude or VS Code, and it uses far fewer tokens than a raw AI build.
Agents are getting first-class infrastructure
Agent Inbox in Zoho Mail, MCP servers for CRM and Projects, bring-your-own model or key, and agents inside Kiosk, Desk and Projects.
A dedicated programme for MSMEs
Zoho for MSMEs launched for any business with an active Udyam registration. Zoho said about 80% of attendees were MSMEs.

What launched or was announced

Grouped by suite

AI layer

NewZia Chat, a chat front end across all Zoho apps, launched 23 Sep. It supports profiles, skills (slash commands), Agent Studio agents, a library for saved outputs, and your own model key.

Zia Search adds 150+ ready-made cards and auto-generated dashboards.

Zoho MCP is coming to Zoho One's integrations panel. CRM now has four MCP servers.

Platform & developer

Creator: a plan agent (prompt → requirements doc → app), a build agent (chat to edit forms and workflows), a chat interface for end users, and editing from Claude or VS Code. All of it is live today.

Catalyst: agent skills, MCP and CLI support for deploying AI-built apps.

Zoho Flow: build flows from plain English, AI utilities, agentic email actions, and an on-prem agent.

NewZoho Fortify for secure-coding training and scanning.

Business apps

NewAgent Inbox in Zoho Mail: permanent addresses for AI agents.

NewZoho DAP, a digital adoption and onboarding platform.

NewZoho CPaaS: transactional email, SMS, WhatsApp and voice in one API.

NewUlaa Enterprise, a browser-level AI security layer.

Nila, a design-lifecycle tool with design systems.

Zoho One: One Bar, Action Panel, embedded dashboards and unified admin. Tables and Apptics are now in the bundle.

CRM: Applets, Canvas home screens, a PRM app, a Commissions app, loops and agents in Kiosk. Plus a restaurant POS.

Desk: blended agents and Automation Studio. Projects: a project-creation agent and watcher agents.

NewZoho for MSMEs programme.

Session notes

Vision & keynote Platform & developer Business apps Customer stories

Timestamps link to that moment in the official livestream.

00:09Welcome

Welcome: the Milestone Edition

Praval Singh, VP Marketing

First Zoholics held on Zoho's own Chennai campus. Earlier editions ran in Bengaluru, Delhi and Mumbai.
Zoho is in its 30th year, with 1M+ customers and 150M+ users. Everything is built in India, including in smaller towns such as Tenkasi and Kumbakonam.
The recurring theme was "Rooted in Zoho": the engineering culture, autonomy and decentralised decisions stay the same even as AI changes everything around them.
Zia Chat launched the day before.

00:20Keynote

Reinvention: the AI economy, monopolies and jobs

Sridhar Vembu, Co-founder & Chief Scientist

The business: India is growing at 40–45%. Growth is slower worldwide, mainly because of the Middle East conflict, not AI. Zoho repeated its no-layoffs stance.
"Weavers to power looms": in February 2023 he told staff that AI would do to hand-written code what power looms did to hand weaving. Software will become abundant.
Thought experiment: if AI makes all software nearly free, vendors have to reinvent themselves, but every customer industry gains.
The real question is ownership: who owns the "looms"? Automated goods should become cheap in terms of human effort. If they stay expensive, you have a monopoly, not a market.
UPI versus WhatsApp: UPI runs close to cost and is nearly free, while card networks charge 2.5–4%. Small businesses pay WhatsApp ₹500–600 a month, and the price keeps going up. India's AI future should look like UPI.
Inside Zoho: no new software engineers hired for about 18 months, while support hiring has increased so humans stay easy to reach.
Pricing: memory costs are up about 500% and a server replacement now costs 3–4× what it did five years ago. Zoho is covering this with productivity instead of price rises.
Vertical SaaS: custom-fit software should cost less than building and hosting it yourself with AI.
Where jobs go: "nature, nurture, culture, scripture". That means ecology, teaching and nursing, the arts and sport, and counselling and festivals: work people want humans to do.

It is not automation killing jobs. It is the goods not becoming cheap enough that everybody can afford them.

00:58Demo

Zia Chat live demo

Gautham, heads MCP, integrations and Catalyst

"What needs my attention today?" pulls meetings, overdue tickets, tasks and unread mail into one view. Records open inside the chat, with no tab switching.
It built an August business-update deck from account data that opens as an editable Zoho Show file.
Account-manager flow: deals in negotiation → overdue invoices → unresolved tickets → turn the answer into a report → share it by email or Cliq.
It hands off to specialist agents. For example, a data-analyst agent inside Zoho Analytics does the analysis and returns the result.
Profiles per persona, skills such as an "email voice" trained on five years of sent mail, and agents from Agent Studio.
Gautham said the groundwork was laid about 8 years ago.

01:09Panel

Deep roots: building in India

Dr. Pratyush Kumar (Co-founder, Sarvam AI) and Sridhar Vembu, moderated by Praval Singh

Sovereignty: without our own technology stack, India remains "a digital colony". Indian tech has built thin layers on others' platforms for too long, like "YouTube creators rather than building YouTube".
Owning the full stack: Sarvam runs models on bare metal with its own inference software, so it can run a new open model efficiently on day zero.
Reward hacking: Sridhar compared models gaming their rewards to companies chasing quarterly numbers (Goodhart's law). That is why Zoho avoids metric-driven management. Pratyush said it is an engineering problem of better reward design, not a conceptual barrier.
What India should prioritise: full-steam R&D on models, but no joining the trillion-dollar deployment race. About $250B of Nvidia chips are sitting undeployed. Intelligence will become a commodity, and token prices are heading toward zero.
Build, buy or rent: AI is clearly ROI-positive. Large enterprises such as banks should own their stack; smaller firms should adopt. Either way you need AI-fluent "forward-deployed engineers" who know the business. Set a one-quarter adoption goal with one metric.
Skills warning: an NBER study found AI raised everyone's output, but only senior lawyers kept learning; juniors gained no lasting skill. Zoho is debating limited AI access for programmers in their first 3–4 years.
Sarvam today: 250–300 people, doubled in a year, average age in the mid-20s, mostly in Bengaluru.

The only way to not pay the toll is to invent.

02:08Launches

Ten things Zoho is proud of this year

Rajendran Dandapani, founding member and Director, Zoho Corp (presented with a beta Zia voice co-host)

Fusion Factory

Creator "clean core": keep the core ERP untouched and build satellite apps around it. The Hindware group, which runs SAP, moved shop-floor logbooks, contractor expenses, price approvals and claims to about 50 Creator apps in one year.
Zoho Flow: "95% of organisations get zero return on GenAI" and "every AI project is a data project in disguise". New: plain-English flows, AI utilities, email-intent routing, and an on-prem agent for data behind firewalls.

Appropriate AI

SalesIQ bring-your-own-AI: for example, a narrow self-hosted model for a hospital or a frontier model for an enterprise.
NewAgent Inbox (Zoho Mail): treats agents as digital employees with permanent addresses, permissions, agent-to-agent messaging and an audit trail.

Cognitive comfort

Nila: design-lifecycle tool from the Zoho Show team, combining prompt-to-app with enforced design systems.
NewZoho DAP: in-app guides, walkthroughs, banners, a help hub and onboarding task tracking.
NewZoho CPaaS: OTPs and alerts over email, SMS, WhatsApp and voice, with compliance built in and Zoho's own multi-region infrastructure.

Timely tech & safety

NewZoho for MSMEs: a programme for any business with an active Udyam registration.
NewZoho Fortify: learn-by-doing secure-coding platform that catches vulnerabilities in AI-generated code before release.
NewUlaa Enterprise: the browser as the AI security control point. It checks identity, session, prompt and response before any data leaves the device.

02:55Zoho One

From unified suite to intelligent operating system

Hari, Head of Marketing, Zoho One

Cited research: 60% of AI projects are abandoned, mainly because legacy apps are disconnected. Unification has to come before AI.
Zoho One has grown from 30+ apps in 2017 to 55+. Zoho Tables, Zoho Apptics and Touchpoint (NFC cards) were added recently.
One Bar: pin up to 10 apps, group apps into Spaces, use QuickNav to jump straight to something like "territory management in CRM", plus an app catalogue. It will roll out across all Zoho apps. New Zoho One sign-ups get it now; existing orgs can request early access.
Action Panel: the coming week's tasks, approvals and reminders from all apps, as cards you can act on.
Embedded dashboards on the Zoho One home screen (Desk first, more apps coming), including Zia dashboards.
Admin: redesigned Zoho Directory, one-time settings such as domain verification that sync to every app, and unified admin notifications with mute and focus.
Zia Chat runs on each user's "work graph", respects Zoho One permissions, and supports bring-your-own key and open models.

03:26CX suite

Human connection in the agentic era

Vaibhav, Product Marketing, CX suite

CRM Applets: vibe-code small tools such as tax or commission calculators directly inside CRM.
Zia Agents: more knowledge-base sources (including a deeper Desk KB) and deployable into third-party apps. CRM has four MCP servers and a model choice (Gemini, Claude and others) for every Zia feature.
Canvas now extends to the CRM home screen, with vibe-coded canvases coming soon. Interaction view adds overlays on existing screens.
Kiosk Studio adds loops and autonomous agents inside kiosk flows.
New apps: PRM for channel partners, Commissions (tiered, volume- or revenue-based), and a POS for restaurants launched the day before.
Bigin stays mobile-first, adding automated payments and catalogues.
Desk: "blended agents", where human and AI agents work the same ticket. Automation Studio supports two-way, multi-path flows you can create from a prompt.
Field Service plus the RouteIQ planner for last-mile teams.
Marketing: email is still the highest-ROI channel. WhatsApp is now inside Campaigns, Snapchat is in Social, and CJO Command Center ties it all together.

03:43Customers

Customer panel: keeping experiences personal

Moderated by Shreya · Vivek Gupta (CTO, Birla Pivot), Guardwell Industries, Everest Industries

Birla Pivot (Aditya Birla's B2B commerce arm) launched on CRM + Books in four months and is now near a billion-dollar top line in three years. It runs a roughly 200-point KYC/credit check, uses AI to enrich leads from GST data, and gives salespeople a 4–5 bullet pitch before each call.
Guardwell Industries (safes and fire resistance, 40 years old) went live on Zoho One in four months with a channel partner, starting with CRM before adding more apps. It says turnover doubled.
Everest Industries (roofing and building materials) uses CRM for beat plans and field order capture, with live stock availability. Its view: agents do the grunt work, humans set guardrails and make the decisions.
Advice: start with the current process even if it's inefficient, digitise it, then improve weekly. Pick a platform for how well it customises and integrates, not an 80% feature-list fit. Build AI into the process from day one. Choose the right implementation partner.

05:02Finance

Finance suite: the continuous close

Product Marketing, Books and Finance

"How's the business?" gets answered in money, but the real picture lives in operations: a lost deal, stock that stopped moving, missed deliveries. Finance needs real-time operational data.
Five shifts: agents doing the work (43% of enterprise software to be agentic by 2028), a continuous close instead of a month-end scramble, cash-flow forecasting by large account, "always verify" zero-trust checks on transactions (with the deepfake-CFO fraud as the example), and a unified core so AI has clean data.
Framework: the five Ms of business (man, method, material, money, machines). Most of the pain sits in the hand-offs between departments.

The livestream lost audio from about 05:10 to 07:37, so the rest of this session and the whole Workplace session aren't in the recording.

07:43Developer

Developer experience: Creator, Catalyst, Flow, RPA

Bharath, Head of Marketing, Developer Platforms

About 300,000 apps were built on Creator in 2024, and about 70% more in 2025, even with vibe-coding tools around.
Why a platform still matters: governance, security, hosting, encryption, disaster recovery, and above all accountability.
Creator is now an AI development platform: the plan agent turns a prompt into a requirements doc (with SAP or CRM integrations listed), then into a working app in 10–15 minutes. The build agent edits forms, layouts and workflows through chat, always asking before changes. Web apps become mobile and tablet apps automatically.
Edit Creator apps from Claude or VS Code: changes write straight to the app's .ds file, so there's one source of truth.
Token-light: Zoho's internal estimate is 1:5 to 1:7 fewer tokens than building the same app directly with an AI coding tool.
Clean core: keep SAP's core untouched ahead of the ECC end-of-life in 2027, and put vendor portals and approvals in Creator.
Catalyst is positioned as a Vercel/Supabase-style host for AI-built apps, and also an AWS/GCP alternative. No per-seat pricing and no egress fees. One developer built an app in 3 weeks that onboarded 20 lakh (2M) users.
Flow and RPA: summarise any flow in plain English. RPA covers legacy systems without APIs, such as SAP GUI or reading email attachments into SAP or CRM. Apptics (mobile monitoring) and QEngine (test automation) round it out. Zoho itself runs 1M+ test cases on QEngine.

Customer voices

Art of Living (Ruchika): donor and donation management, field social work captured in local languages by volunteers on portals, property management and course registrations, all on Creator. They were building in-house within six months. She called Creator "magic", the heart that beats to their rhythm.
Raptee.HV (Sarath): a Chennai electric-motorcycle maker. Creator runs R&D through to service. The mobile-app backend, website and OTPs moved from GCP to Catalyst with no downtime, and they deploy through Zoho MCP from VS Code.
Varun (steel wheel-rim maker): started with one Creator app for one department and now it's central to their ERP, linked to SAP. "English, Hindi and Deluge."

09:03Projects

Projects, Sprints and the attention gap

Kritika, Head of Marketing, Project Management suite

Projects turned 20 this year; Sprints turns 10. Projects Plus combines both with Analytics and WorkDrive.
This year: Projects Infinity (custom modules at every level), a module gallery (change requests, OKRs, incidents, risks, material requests), MCP support, and Sprints 3.0 with risk and opportunity, test case and budget management.
Coming: a project-creation agent that turns an uploaded requirements doc into a live project with phases, tasks and owners, not a template. Also an auto sprint planner.
Autonomous watchers: Schedule Analyzer, a Customer Escalation agent that reads client comments for dissatisfaction, a Stand-up Digest, and a Dependency Manager. Portfolio management is coming to Sprints.
Zia actions in workflow rules: summarise, translate, categorise, tag, or run a custom prompt. AI fields and widgets run a prompt once and store the result, which saves AI credits at scale.

The Analytics/BI session before this (about 08:40–09:03) also has no audio in the recording.

09:27Close

Closing

Praval Singh

Thanks to the events team, which has run Zoholics for three years; one member is a Zoho Schools graduate. See you next year.

What this means for our clients

The Biz Systems read

Pitch unification first

Zoho's own message is that AI fails on disconnected apps. For clients running 3–4 separate tools, the Zoho One consolidation case is now also an AI-readiness case.

Clean core for SAP and Tally shops

Manufacturing clients on SAP or Tally don't need to rip them out. The Hindware pattern (satellite Creator apps around a clean ERP) is a low-risk entry we can sell.

Creator and Catalyst builds get faster

Plan agent to build agent, plus MCP from Claude or VS Code, shortens our delivery cycle. Estimates and SOWs should reflect that, and the governance story is our edge over freelance vibe-coders.

Zia Chat readiness

Zia Chat only works as well as the permissions, data hygiene and cross-app links underneath. That makes clean-up and configuration work a natural AMC offer.

New products to watch

CPaaS (for WhatsApp and OTP-heavy clients), DAP (adoption and onboarding for large CRM rollouts), Commissions and PRM (for dealer networks), and Agent Inbox once agents run in production.

MSME programme

Zoho for MSMEs is aimed at most of our pipeline. We should confirm the eligibility and pricing details with our partner manager before we quote it to clients.

Gallery

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