Zoho Makes AI Accessible in Autopilot Apps Drive

Like any autonomous widget that is getting better and more versatile every day, Zoho is keeping it consistent and persistent in its drive toward making AI enhancements almost effortless and frictionless.

In a series of monthly product updates, the enterprise applications vendor is making available at no extra costs a slew of AI-enabled features from zero-touch reporting building to automatic content building WorkDrive that helps improve business processes for customer support and company-wide collaboration.

Additionally, Zoho is strengthening its hardware footprint through recent acquisitions, especially in strategic verticals like healthcare, manufacturing and energy, positioning itself as the solution play for a large swath of organizations from small businesses to multinationals. All these developments coincide with its latest branding campaign – To Build Anything That Truly Lasts, It Takes Time – as Zoho zeroes in on the concept of kaizen before perfection can be reached.

Unlike rivals that prioritize overnight successes and hype-driven breakthroughs, Zoho is making steady and incremental progress by incorporating Zia, its AI model, into many of its CRM, content management and collaboration applications in an unobtrusive manner.

The ideal AI solution, according to Raju Vegesna, Zoho’s Chief Evangelist, will be invisible to end users mostly operating in the background by generating suggestions, recommendations and actionable results that anyone can leverage right away.

For example, in its popular CRM application used by hundreds of thousands of customers worldwide, a user can issue a prompt with Ask Zia to create an AI-generated report that meets one’s expectations and demands if further changes are needed. Other features include no-code CRM implementation using natural language processing, text-based workflow creation, and bringing image design to life shortcuts.

Zoho CEO Mani Vembu said, “Now, anyone can create capabilities, workflows, or reports in CRM with a simple prompt.’’

In its latest AI monthly update, Zoho unveiled Zia Hubs to boost Zoho WorkDrive by running the task of content management on autopilot, organizing and cross-referencing different formats and delivering them to users according to their prompts at a moment’s notice.

Then it directs the relevant content in the right context to different projects and teams using Zoho Flow, even taking advantage of third-party apps such as DocuSign PDF, RingCentral call logs, and Zoom video files by placing them in Zia Hubs for attributable sourcing, inclusion and adaptation.

The stakes are high as Zoho WorkDrive competes heavily with Adobe, Box, Dropbox, Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive for the dominance of content management as AI becomes the catalyst for easy access and retrieval of massive amounts of data, contextual insights

Zia Hubs will become generally available in the third quarter of 2025 with future updates focusing on combining structured data and unstructured ones in a central repository that serves as the connecting point that triggers auto-generated responses that are relevant, manageable and reliable, all deriving from the mission-critical record-keeping and seamless integration work across its portfolio of 55 apps.

The painstaking steps Zoho makes will go a long way to ensure its long-term success as the vendor has chalked up another year of above-average growth for its target audience. Our latest market-sizing reports attribute its 2024 performance to a steady increase in the number of SMB customers that favor its systematic approach when it comes to AI development, privacy protection, and all-encompassing infrastructure support.

Table 1: Top 10 Collaboration Software Vendors, Market Shares and Market Size, 2024

Source: APPS RUN THE WORLD, July 2025

Another sign that Zoho is winning converts is in the enterprise space with plenty of big organizations evaluating its solutions based on our continuously updated Buyer Intent Signals that are sourced from thousands of unique visitors every day accessing ARTW proprietary premium content on enterprise customers and tens of millions of software purchases.

Table 2 – Top Zoho Apps evaluated from software buyers based on ARTW Buyer Intent Signals

Of these signals captured within the past 90 days, half of them are derived from organizations with more than 100 employees, as shown below.

Table 3 – Companies evaluating Zoho apps by company size based on ARTW Buyer Intent Signals

The growing interest in Zoho among large enterprises comes at a time when Zoho is making bets on a slew of robotics startups designed to supplement its enterprise applications with cutting-edge products from robots to sustainability offerings. Zoho’s recent strategic acquisitions include:

• Asimov Robotics – Health inspection and service robotics
• Boson Motors – Autonomous e-vehicles start-up
• Energy24by7 – Solar tech start-up
• Genrobotics – Medical and healthcare robotics
• Netrasemi – Fabless semi-conductor
• vTitan – Healthcare tech start-up
• Zentron Labs – Manufacturing, agriculture, commerce robotics start-up.

It’s clear that Zoho is embarking on a new journey with the mission to become the uber startup that transforms how companies operate, one step at a time.

• Apps Business