There’s no shortage of buzz around artificial intelligence. From managing your calendar to automating tasks—and yes, even jokes about folding your laundry—AI is everywhere. When used for personal reasons, it’s often simple, intuitive, and undeniably helpful. Many of us already use AI to help draft emails, summarize documents, or streamline our day-to-day work.
But implementing AI across an entire organization? That’s a different story altogether.
Enterprise-wide adoption brings a new set of challenges. You need to consider:
- Data privacy and compliance: Is the AI handling sensitive information responsibly?
- Security: How protected is your data within the model?
- Transparency and control: Do you know what the AI is doing? Can you guide it?
These aren’t just technical concerns; they’re business-critical decisions. That’s why, after analyzing what businesses need and expect from AI, we’ve taken a thoughtful, user-first approach to implementing AI in Zoho Workplace: Building an AI that works with you, respects your data, and helps you focus on what really matters.
In this blog series, we’ll explore the latest AI advancements that will be released soon across Zoho Workplace. We’ve grouped them into three key categories:
- Zia Skills: Tools that help you create, summarize, and refine content with ease.
- Ask Zia: A natural language interface that lets you talk to your apps and get things done across the suite.
- Zia Agents: Background automation that handles repetitive tasks so you can focus on what matters.
Here’s a quick sneak peek.
What if you could work smarter?
The tasks that slow us down aren’t always the biggest ones. They’re the everyday things like answering emails, drafting notes, or making sense of long chat threads. Zia, the generative AI in Zoho Workplace, helps lighten that load.
It can summarize lengthy chats or draft an email for you to refine, or adjust your tone or words so they read the way you intend. It can create simple visuals or generate structured content where it’s required. You can do all of this and more with simple prompts or short descriptions. These small supports add up, giving you time back without changing how you work.
What if you could talk to your apps?
We all spend too much time moving between tools, whether it’s searching for an email, copying details into a document, or setting up a meeting. Imagine if you could just talk to your apps the way you talk to a colleague, naturally and without friction. That’s what Ask Zia, the conversational AI in Zoho Workplace, is built for.
You can chat with Ask Zia right inside your apps. In Mail, it can:
- Summarize a long email chain.
- Pick out the action items from a long email.
- Draw insights from emails.
With a quick prompt, you can also:
- Schedule events in your calendar.
- Pull up all of the events you attended with your colleagues.
But where Ask Zia really stands out is when it connects multiple apps at one time. You can ask it to:
- Find emails from a client.
- Create a summary.
- Turn it into a document.
- Share it with your teammates.
You can do all of this with a single request. That’s three or more apps working together smoothly, with you simply giving the instruction. Instead of working around your apps, you can now just ask and let them work for you.
What if your apps anticipated what you need?
The small tasks in your day often take more time than you realize—clearing an inbox, watching out for threats, or setting reminders. None of these need deep thinking, but they’re all reactive, not proactive.
That’s why we built Zia Agents. They’re smart AI agents designed to handle routine tasks (the way you want to). Unlike simple rules or filters, they learn from how you work, suggest the next step, and even automate it—with your supervision when needed.
Here’s a quick look at some of the agents in Zoho Workplace:
Cleanup Agent: Learns your email habits, like which messages you ignore or delete, and suggests a plan to clear out the clutter. With your approval, it can tidy up your inbox instantly and keep it that way over time.
Threat Mitigation Agent: Flags and neutralizes risks or threats before they spread. It also keeps your admins informed with notifications.
Lead Qualifier Agent: Identifies potential leads in your inbox and passes them into Zoho CRM, keeping your pipeline updated.
These are just a few of the AI agents we have in store for you, including a Legal Classifier Agent to match received legal contracts with your organization's standard legal documents, and much more. Together, these agents help your apps do more than respond to instructions. They anticipate what you need, reduce repetitive work, and give you the time to focus on decisions and ideas that need you most.
Note: If any of these features caught your eye, secure your spot on the early notification list. We'll send you an exclusive alert the moment they go live.
Built with flexibility
Different features use different models depending on the task. Features that need to understand your Zoho-specific data, such as conversations with Ask Zia and the Zia Agents, are powered by Zoho’s own LLM. Creative and generative features, like drafting or summarizing, can work with third-party models that you bring in through a secure BYOK (Bring Your Own Key) setup. This gives you flexibility where you want it, and privacy and governance where you need it.
What's in store?
AI can feel abstract until you see how it fits into the flow of your own work. That’s why we’ve built these features to work quietly in the background, supporting the way you already collaborate instead of forcing new habits.
This blog series will walk you through each of these areas in more detail. Up next, we’ll look at how Zia, our generative AI, is helping you write, summarize, and create with more ease and confidence.
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