Zoho also announced the availability of two new work orchestration capabilities within CRM for Everyone, which launched last year.
In what Zoho is terming their biggest generative AI release to date, the company announced new contextual AI capabilities across marketing, sales, and service use cases. Zoho announced Zoho Payments and also announced the general availability of Connected Workflows and Connected Records, two new work orchestration capabilities within CRM for Everyone, which launched last year. These capabilities are aimed at helping organizations orchestrate work smoothly through the customer journey and drive efficiency through the contextual use of AI technology. Zoho Payments, another new app, is also now available in some markets.
“This is a broader announcement that includes a number of things beyond AI,” said Raju Vegesna, Chief Evangelist at Zoho. “The issue is how can we provide access broadly, which is what CRM for Everyone is about. There are two aspects – CRM for Everyone and Demand for everyone. We are now introducing a few capabilities so people without technical knowledge can customize CRM. Since 2015, Zoho has been consistently adding AI-driven capabilities for marketing and sales teams. Today’s announcements go deeper, making AI invisible and invaluable to every customer-facing role in the organization.”
AI-driven recommendations for the next actions, personalized to each salesperson, based on each deal and account’s engagement and context, are now available.
“Zia now analyzes the context of your business and suggests what field should belong to a particular module,” Vegesnu said. “It makes module creation easily.” Zia Score, Zoho’s multidimensional lead-scoring model, has been expanded and applicable to other use cases, including customer engagement, account health, and churn, allowing more proactive growth initiatives throughout the journey.
“CRM for Everyone back was launched in preview a few months ago,” he noted. “Customers wanted to do more with it and that’s where AI comes in, so that module creation is now powered by Zia.” .
Vegesnu emphasized that you can create new workflows with Zia as well,
“You can set up triggers like finding a deal with value greater than $50000, or create a report such as finding all vehicles sold over $40,000. Once a workflow is created it gives it a name as well. It also takes you to another productivity level. You can create new workflows with Zia as well.”
Zoho Payments, which is launching at Zoholics 2025, is new, and important.
“We help businesses accept payments from their customers,” said Sivaramakrishnan Iswaran, Global Head of Zoho Finance & Operations at Zoho. “We do a lot of developing and the underlaying product is very complex.”
Iswaran said that what sets Zoho apart here is better payment success rate, better fraud and risk detection, faster settlements, native payment capabilities within Zoho ecosystem and support for multiple payment workflows and business scenarios .
“We built the entire order to cash stack from the ground up,” he said, “It positively impacts the top line and bottom line
Iswaran said that Zoho Payments is just the beginning.
“We are stepping into financial services with more products to follow, and there are more exciting launches,” he indicated.
Zoho Payments is available in the US and India and will be coming to a lot more companies soon.
“Gen AI and work orchestration capabilities help accelerate responses, reduce internal gaps, drive innovation, and improve the quality of CX,” Iswaran noted. “Prompt-based actions are the ability for administrators to write prompts for various trigger actions in rule-based workflow automation as well as on the Guided Conversations bot.
Real-time actionable prescriptions for growth can now be personalized to each team member, helping organizations break down strategic goals into actionable tactics that refine with each interaction
Prompt-based custom actions now available include a no-code experience using plain text prompts to create custom actions, such as generating an account summary, performing a SWOT analysis, or writing an escalation response, each of which can be triggered by a single click of a custom button, tailored to the role of each employee.
“This allows people to choose Workflow, so they can choose to take control,” Iswaran said.
“The other feature added is Image to Design” he added. “It associates fields to a CRM system – so you can create and design Image Now.”
Prompt-based actions are the ability for administrators to write prompts for various trigger actions in rule-based workflow automation as well as on the Guided Conversations bot builder.
“Gen AI and work orchestration capabilities help accelerate responses, reduce internal gaps, drive innovation, and improve the quality of CX,” Iswaran noted. “Prompt-based actions are the ability for administrators to write prompts for various trigger actions in rule-based workflow automation as well as on the Guided Conversations bot.
Real-time actionable prescriptions for growth can now be personalized to each team member, helping organizations break down strategic goals into actionable tactics that refine with each interaction
Prompt-based custom actions now available are a no-code experience using plain text prompts to create custom actions, such as generating an account summary, performing a SWOT analysis, or writing an escalation response, each of which can be triggered by a single click of a custom button, tailored to the role of each employee.
“This allows people to choose Workflow, so they can choose to take control,” Iswaran said.
First announced in 2018, Zia Answer Bot can now respond to customers via web and mobile embeds, instant messaging channels, and any other custom channels (through an API).
Response Assistance, also new, is an expanded set of response-writing assistance capabilities to generate professional and factually correct responses, or help with tone, length, and grammatical correctness. Both response assistance and Zia Answer Bot are now powered by Zoho’s self-hosted LLM, ensuring better privacy controls.
“For certain things, we automatically pick the right model at the back end, but there is going to be an option foor the customer to bring in their own element — not everything but some of these,” Vegesna stated.
Zia, available for use against fraud, will be embodied into all the payments products,” Iswaran said “Zia is embedded, but not into all payment products,” Iswaran said.
“One of the things we would like to do is lending, but these products are going to take time,” Iswaran concluded.
Zoho also announced Ulaa Enterprise, an enterprise-ready version of the company’s privacy-focused browser tailored specifically to the security and visibility needs of enterprise organizations. With Ulaa Enterprise, companies can prevent threats at the browser l evel while striking a balance between potent security, ease-of-use, and extensive control features, all without the complexity of third-party tools or virtual environments.
