With 100 million users, Zoho leverages AI for future growth

Zoho Corporation, a leading player in the industry, provides a comprehensive array of efficiency-boosting software and web-based business tools to its vast user base of over 100 million worldwide. With a strong focus on diversity and innovation, Zoho takes pride in its extensive product portfolio and remains in sync with evolving trends and regulatory requirements.  

In this exclusive interview, Economy Middle East had the opportunity to speak with Hyther Nizam, president of Zoho Middle East and Africa (MEA), as he sheds light on the driving forces behind the company’s growth and much more. 

Zoho has recently reached 100 million users globally across more than 55 business applications. What are the key factors that have contributed to this growth? How does Zoho plan to continue growing its user base?

We have achieved this milestone through gradual growth, propelled by various contributing factors. First and foremost, our diverse portfolio of products has allowed us to cater to a diverse set of business needs. Second, as businesses realize that using separate multiple applications creates data silos, we saw an increasing adoption of our contextually unified platforms like Zoho One, Zoho CRM Plus and Zoho Workplace.  

We have also expanded globally with what we call a transnational localism strategy, wherein our growth is locally rooted while we stay globally connected through shared knowledge and culture. As part of our transnational localism efforts, we have invested in localizing our solutions such as providing Arabic support in our key products, integration with local payment gateway, and compliance with local requirements such as VAT. We have also partnered with private and public entities to help provide local businesses access to our enterprise technology. All these efforts have helped us gain a user base across over 150 countries.   

How does Zoho leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and ChatGPT to enhance its products? Can you share some examples of new products that have been launched with these technologies?

Given Zoho’s engineering and research and development focus, we have been building our AI stack for over a decade now, including our powerful AI engine, Zia. We have developed and deployed generative AI capabilities in varying degrees, predominantly outside the medium model range across our product portfolio – including translation, grammar error correction/detection, and Natural Language Q&A, among others. 

Other examples include Ask Zia, Zoho’s AI assistant that interprets user prompts to generate business dashboards or KPI reports; Zia Presentations, an AI assistant that automatically creates presentations based on a given data set; and Zia Activity Extraction, which autonomously identifies and records business activities like calls, meetings and schedules. 

In the near future, we plan to expand the integration of large language model (LLM) capabilities across our offerings, Ultimately, our goal is to fully use all LLMs in the Zoho cloud. Currently, we have contextually integrated some of our products such as Zoho CRM, Zoho Writer and Zoho Desk with OpenAI, which helps our users in predictive analyses, summarization, and content creation, among others. 

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How does Zoho ensure that its products are compliant with tax laws in different markets? What are some of the challenges that you face? 

Almost every country has its own laws and guidelines when it comes to financial regulation and taxation. In the case of countries, such as the U.S. and Canada, states and provinces, too, have their own taxation intricacies. In recent years, electronic invoicing and digital banking have gone mainstream, adding further to the complexities of building finance and accounting software. To ensure that our customers’ business and compliance requirements are met, we meticulously study each market’s needs, liaise with the respective authorities, consult with internal and external subject matter experts, and develop market-focused compliant apps. 

Zoho’s accounting solution, for instance, Zoho Books, has various country editions that are compliant with local tax laws and e-invoicing requirements. It ensures that we help our customers be compliant with the latest regulations. 

What is the one-stack approach and how does it benefit Zoho’s customers?

Zoho’s products have been built from the ground up on the same technology stack, and hosted in the same data centers. This unified stack facilitates seamless and contextual data flow between products, maintaining a single, authoritative source of truth instead of redundant data. Moreover, a vertically integrated stack ensures that we are able to provide services such as AI, SSO and so on that are run through the entire stack, resulting in faster and more efficient software. 

How does Zoho protect the privacy and security of its users’ data? What are some of the security features you have implemented?

Privacy is at the core of everything we do at Zoho, driving our organizational decisions. We believe privacy is a fundamental right, especially given the prevalent digital landscape where privacy faces a significant business model challenge. This belief inspired us to adopt a revenue model independent of ad revenues, ensuring our free products remain ad-free. As we are committed to protecting user data, this led us to build our tech stack from the ground up, so we have control over the data, devoid of intrusive third parties.  Additionally, we have removed third-party trackers from our website. As an extension of this philosophy we recently launched Ulaa, a privacy-centric browser.  

As the spectrum of threats increases, security is becoming a necessity, which is why we remain compliant with the latest developments in the field. This includes adherence to the General Data Protection Regulation, not only within Europe but globally. We also have a robust internal team that identifies and addresses vulnerabilities. In addition, we are compliant with the latest security standards, including certifications like ISO 27001, ISO27017, ISO27018 and HIPPA, among others. 

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