Zoho has consistently taken a long-horizon approach to product development, even when the industry gets swept up in new trends. How do you balance long-term R&D with market expectations—especially in CX, where hype cycles can be loud and fast?
We have always focused on adding value, not chasing the hype. This balance isn’t just a strategy; it’s an organisational foundation which has been the reason for our R&D-first approach.
The CX market is known to be noisy, with a new acronym coming up every year. We follow the same Zoho approach here as well: we tune out the noise and focus our R&D-on building the deep tech capabilities and building a strong platform foundation. We don’t want to just bolt on features, instead, we are building a cohesive technology stack from the ground up, from the data centres (which we own) to the AI models (which we have built and trained).
For example, every innovation does not mean it has to be an AI update. A common case is customers repeatedly contacting support for order-status updates. We realised that there will have to be a seamless toggle between the bot and the customer agent, without loosing context, so we introduced ‘blended conversations’ combining Guided conversations with the Instant Messaging (IM) Framework.
Additionally, we offer ‘CRM for Everyone’, because a good customer experience depends on many stakeholders within an organisation. ‘CRM for Everyone’ enables sales teams that are central to maintaining customer relationships, to collaborate and coordinate with other customer-facing groups on one platform, rather than through fragmented conversations. In addition to providing cross-functional access to CRM, each team has the ability to independently manage their workflows while operating within the existing IT infrastructure.
Zoho has consistently championed the philosophy of “built in India, for the world” — developing products entirely in India and delivering them to global markets. In a landscape shaped by major CX platforms like Microsoft and Salesforce, how is Zoho reimagining the customer experience with this approach? And what distinct advantages does building from India bring to the customers you serve across the world?
“Made in India, Made for the World” is rooted in our conviction that world-class products don’t necessarily have to originate from Silicon Valley. It’s a foundational principle that has positioned us as a key player in today’s tech ecosystem.
When it comes to reimagining CX, it starts by acknowledging that a great customer experience requires a great employee experience, and that means eliminating data silos that frustrate everyone. Given that our 55+ products have been built in-house from scratch, we don’t have the integration debt that others may carry from decades of costly acquisitions. Our entire CX and back-office stack runs natively, allowing us to offer true end-to-end visibility, from the first marketing touch point to the final invoice and support ticket.
The key advantage of our foundation is both value driven offering and commitment. The cost efficiencies we gain from our decentralised R&D model are passed directly to our global customers, making feature-rich, enterprise-grade software accessible to businesses of all sizes. More importantly, building from India reinforces our commitment to data sovereignty and privacy. For global customers, this means their data is handled by a provider whose core business philosophy is not data monetisation, but product trust.
Recent reports suggest the Indian government is transitioning email services for nearly 12 lakh employees from NIC to Zoho Mail — a landmark endorsement of India’s own technology ecosystem. From a marketing and brand leadership perspective, how is Zoho positioning this move to reinforce trust, cybersecurity confidence, and the broader narrative of digital sovereignty? And what does this milestone mean for Zoho’s global brand perception going forward?
The association with the government is not new for us, we have worked with them in the past as well. For instance, during the pandemic, Zoho CRM backed Tamil Nadu’s COVID War Room, Zoho Creator’s low-code solution powered Chennai Corporation’s vaccination tracking system, which vaccinated over 3 lakh people, and Zoho Forms facilitated health data gathering for the Goa government. Recently, Zoho was selected after a rigorous tender evaluation to help NIC modernise their email and collaboration suite.
Additionally, for years, we have firmly adhered to a philosophy of no advertisements and no ad monetisation in our products, treating privacy not as an optional feature but as a core principle. Our comprehensive cybersecurity framework is built to protect both enterprises and their users, featuring four key solutions: a privacy-focused browser (Ulaa), a workforce identity and access management platform (Zoho Directory), multi-factor authentication (OneAuth), and secure password management (Zoho Vault). This security infrastructure delivers top-tier protection against tracking, data breaches, and cyber threats, without compromising employee or organisational efficiency. Even our popular products, such as Zoho Mail, come equipped with advanced security tools like email flagging and warnings for suspicious messages.
As AI becomes deeply embedded in SaaS, how do you see the role of AI shifting within customer experience platforms? And in what ways is Zoho’s approach with Zia—and your own business-use-case LLM—different from the industry’s generic “AI for everything” narrative?
The role of AI in CX must shift from being a generic conversational layer to being a contextual intelligence fabric that automates workflows silently. The industry’s “AI for everything” approach often results in AI that knows a lot about the world but nothing about your business, leading to generic, sometimes hallucinated, outputs.
Our approach with Zia is fundamentally different:
Embedded and Contextual: Zia is not a AI chatbot, it’s an AI layer embedded natively across our applications. It operates with role-aware intelligence. In Zoho Desk, Zia analyses customer sentiment and suggests the next-best-action; in Zoho CRM, it predicts best time to call a customer. It is designed to fade into the background and enhance productivity without being distracting.
Privacy-First and Right-Sized LLMs: We built our own Zia LLM from scratch, trained specifically on business and enterprise use-cases to retain business context, running securely on our private data centres. This is key, we are not using customer data to train our generic models, and we give customers the control to use smaller, domain-specific models (1.3B, 7B parameters) that are right-sized for tasks like summarisation and lead scoring.
Our emphasis on accuracy, privacy, and business relevance makes the AI trustworthy and tailored to actual business needs, while also reducing our environmental impact through efficient use of our LLMs. This sets us apart from generic models that compromise data security and output quality for sheer scale.
For businesses that want to shift from chasing trends to building long-term, meaningful CX capabilities, where should they start, and what’s one immediate action they can take today?
They need to stop thinking about CX as just a marketing tool or a support channel.
Meaningful CX capabilities are built on a foundation of internal coherence. As long as sales data, support tickets, and finance records live in three different systems, your customer experience will feel disjointed. One key reason behind launching CRM for Everyone is to make CX more accessible and inclusive, while improving both customer and employee experiences. The underlying goal is to democratise CRM access, eliminate siloed operations, and provide organisations with a single, unified source of truth for managing customer interactions. This approach enables greater transparency, accelerates internal workflows, minimises manual effort, and ensures a more seamless, consistent customer experience across all touchpoints.
