Zoho Launches Zia Chat, an AI interface for frictionless work, and Announces Entry into Vertical SaaS with Seven Industry-Specific Applications

Zoho Launches Zia Chat, an AI interface for frictionless work, and Announces Entry into Vertical SaaS with Seven Industry-Specific Applications

Zia Chat gives businesses a single AI interface to find prospects and customers, generate and qualify leads, resolve support issues, and manage invoices and finances across Zoho and connected business systems. It brings together data and actions across sales, marketing, support, HR and finance, helping teams move from questions to business outcomes in one conversation. Zoho's vertical SaaS adds industry-specific depth to this broader business context.

Chennai, September 23, 2026 - Zoho, the global technology company headquartered in Chennai, today announced the launch of Zia Chat, an AI interface for frictionless work, that gives users one interface to find information, understand context, and take action across the applications they use at work. Built natively into Zoho's business applications and extensible to other business systems through MCP integrations, Zia Chat brings the information, context and workflows users need into a single conversational interface. The company also announced its entry into vertical SaaS, with seven new industry-specific applications designed around the regulatory, operational, and workflow requirements of specialised industries.

"Every day, employees waste their time navigating menus, hunting for dropdowns and fighting with fragmented software interfaces. There is an interface crisis, and people spend too much time searching for the right context and data. We strip away the UIs of different applications and give employees a single, unified AI interface across the business," said Sridhar Vembu, Chief Scientist and Co-founder, Zoho.

"Behind the interface problem is a deeper issue, fragmented business context. When information and workflows are spread across multiple applications, AI has only a partial view of the business. Zia Chat brings that information and context together, so users can find information, understand context and take action across applications through one conversational experience. Business context is also shaped by the workflows, rules and regulatory requirements of each industry. Our expansion into vertical SaaS brings that industry-specific context onto the same platform," he further added.

The announcement comes as Zoho continues to grow in India, with revenue in the country increasing 47% year over year in 2025. The growth drivers of this momentum are prominent offerings including, Zoho Workplace, Zoho One, Zoho CRM, Zoho Books and Zoho People. ITeS, manufacturing, BFSI, professional services, and retail are among the leading industry sectors contributing to this growth. The automotive sector has also emerged as a strong area of growth for Zoho in India, with increasing customer traction across the industry.

Zia Chat: an AI interface for frictionless work

Zia Chat, an AI interface for frictionless work, is built directly into the Zoho ecosystem. It gives users a single conversational interface to find information, understand what is happening across their business, create what they need, and take action across the applications they use at work.

With access to the information and capabilities they are authorised to use, users can retrieve and connect information across applications, summarise conversations and records, analyse business data, and turn it into reports, charts, spreadsheets, presentations, and other business outputs. They can also draft proposals and follow-up emails, create and assign tasks, share recurring support issues with a management channel, send low-stock alerts to an inventory team, or schedule recurring reports-all without switching between applications.

For example, a salesperson could ask Zia Chat to review an account's recent interactions, summarise open support issues and payment history, identify potential risks, and prepare a customer presentation in Zoho Show. From the same conversation, they could then draft a follow-up email and create tasks for the account team.

Deeply embedded within Zoho: Zia Chat is built directly into the Zoho ecosystem, with user identity, permissions, applications, and business context already part of the experience. It can work across applications, modules, fields, and records a user is authorised to access, and connect information across Zoho applications without requiring separate integrations to be configured for each one.

Understands business context: Zia Chat understands requests in the context of the business, not just the individual prompt. It identifies relevant business entities and relationships across Zoho apps, using capabilities such as semantic search, resolvers, the work graph, and proximity signals to find the right information and ground its answers in the appropriate business context.

Extensible beyond Zoho: Through MCP integrations, Zia Chat can also connect with applications and systems outside the Zoho ecosystem. Organisations can bring relevant information and capabilities from their wider technology environment into the same conversational experience, while retaining Zia Chat's deeper native integration with Zoho applications.

Unified conversational interface: Zia Chat provides a unified conversational experience that users can navigate without learning a new interface for each application. Users can ask questions, explore business information, create outputs, and access capabilities from the same interface. They can use Skills for specialised tasks, switch between Profiles configured for different roles and preferences, and delegate multi-step work to Zia Agents. Organizations can also configure Profiles around different functions and workflows, with access scoped to the applications and information relevant to each role.

Choice of AI models: Zia Chat is model-agnostic, allowing organisations to choose the AI LLMs that power their experience rather than tying their business context, workflows, and capabilities to a single provider. This gives organisations the flexibility to adopt different models as capabilities, cost, and performance evolve while keeping the business layer consistent.

Built around enterprise permissions and approvals: Zia Chat can access only the information and actions available to the user, while respecting the authorization and privilege boundaries already defined in each app. If a user can view but not edit a record, Zia Chat cannot edit it, and actions requiring approval remain with the authorised approver. For external systems, access is governed by the permissions and capabilities exposed through the relevant integration. Users review and confirm actions before anything is created, changed, or sent.

Responses can link back to the underlying records used to generate them, allowing users to verify the source lineage directly. Data accessed by Zia Chat is not used to train Zoho's AI models.

Zoho enters vertical SaaS

For more than two decades, Zoho has built a broad, integrated suite of business applications that addresses common business needs across functions. But businesses operate within industries, each with distinct workflows, business rules, regulatory requirements and operating realities. Zoho is now extending its platform into these industry-specific contexts through vertical SaaS, combining purpose-built applications with its existing suite to address critical industry needs while connecting workflows, applications and data on a single platform.

This combination of horizontal breadth and vertical depth also creates richer business context for AI. By connecting industry-specific applications with the broader business environment, Zoho can enable AI to understand the entities, relationships, rules and workflows that shape how a business operates, beyond individual applications and their data.

The company is initially expanding its vertical offerings across seven industries:

Retail: Zoho for Retail brings together applications across the retail lifecycle, connecting customer engagement with broader retail operations. The offering includes capabilities across point-of-sale, ERP, payments, commerce, sales, marketing and inventory management. As part of this offering, Zoho is launching Zoho RetailIQ, a CRM purpose-built for physical retail businesses to turn customer and transaction data into stronger engagement, loyalty and repeat revenue. RetailIQ brings customer profiles, campaigns, loyalty and feedback into a single retail-specific workflow, helping businesses understand purchase behaviour, segment customers, and personalise engagement across WhatsApp, SMS and RCS. It can connect with supported retail billing systems and Zoho applications, including Zoho POS, Zoho ERP and Zoho Desk.

Automotive: Zoho for Automotive connects customer, dealer, vehicle and operational data across the automotive lifecycle, with capabilities spanning sales, service, spares, warranty, dealer operations and analytics. It can integrate with existing OEM, ERP and legacy systems to support connected automotive workflows. As part of this offering, Zoho is launching Zoho AutoDMS, an industry-focused dealer management solution designed to help automotive businesses streamline operations, improve dealer productivity and deliver more consistent customer experiences.

BFSI: Zoho for BFSI brings purpose-built solutions for banks, NBFCs, insurers and other financial institutions, spanning customer relationship management, loan origination, business rules and decisioning. The offering is designed to help financial institutions streamline operations, adapt processes and respond to evolving business priorities and regulatory requirements. As part of this offering, Zoho is launching Zoho LOS, a loan origination system that digitises the entire lending journey, from application and verification to decisioning and disbursement, on a single platform. By bringing borrower information, workflows, decisioning, approvals, and downstream processes together, Zoho LOS helps financial institutions accelerate loan processing, enable consistent decision-making, maintain compliance, and gain end-to-end visibility across origination. AI-powered document intelligence and agentic workflows assist teams across lending, while unified data, MCPs, and agent-building capabilities extend intelligence across connected workflows.

Healthcare: Zoho for Healthcare brings together connected solutions for clinics, hospitals and healthcare enterprises across patient records, appointments, billing and patient engagement. The ecosystem can integrate with existing EHR, EMR and HIMS environments, supporting interoperability without requiring organizations to replace their existing systems. As part of this offering, Zoho is launching MedScribe, an AI-native, ABDM-compliant clinical documentation solution that helps clinicians turn conversations into structured clinical records and access patient information through contextual queries, with specialty templates, voice-to-text and multilingual capabilities built into the clinical workflow.

Education: Zoho for Education brings together purpose-built solutions for schools, colleges and universities across academic and administrative workflows. The broader ecosystem includes Zoho Classes, Zoho Mail, WorkDrive, Creator and other productivity applications. As part of this offering, Zoho is launching Zoho Campus, an institutional platform initially launching in India that brings academic and administrative workflows onto a single platform. Campus connects processes including admissions, fee collection, attendance, timetables, assignments and staff records through a central source of truth, with a unified dashboard and single sign-on across the institution.

Real Estate: Zoho for Real Estate brings together industry-specific workflows, business logic, security and data architecture to help brokers and builders scale operations and accelerate sales. The solution connects the end-to-end property buying journey, from lead capture and assignment through follow-ups, property matching, site visits and deal closure, providing real estate businesses with sales process management and workflow automation.

Restaurants: Zoho POS for Restaurants is a cloud-based point of sale application that enables restaurants to manage omnichannel orders, dine-in and table service, menu and kitchen operations, inventory and recipe management, self-service ordering, and catering and event management, all from a single platform. To empower restaurants to digitise their operations, businesses billing up to ₹12 lakh per year on Zoho POS can use the platform for free.

Across its vertical portfolio, Zoho is combining industry-specific capabilities with the breadth of its business suite and interoperability with other systems where required. The applications are designed to be configurable and extensible as businesses evolve.

Zoho plans to expand its vertical SaaS portfolio across more industries over time.

About Zoho

With over 60 applications across nearly every major business category, Zoho is one of the world's most prolific technology companies. Headquartered in Chennai, India, Zoho is privately held and profitable, employing more than 19,000 people worldwide. More than 150 million users globally trust Zoho to run their businesses. Zoho owns and operates its own data centres, ensuring complete oversight of customer data privacy and security. For more information, visit www.zoho.com.

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