[Exclusive] Zoho Looks to Release Its Own Generative AI Solutions Soon

Amid the hype around generative AI in business and enterprise solutions, Zoho today announced that it is doubling down on investment efforts in R&D, and expects to release more generative AI solutions in phases through 2023 and 2024. 

While the company already offers many AI capabilities, generative AI has been on their radar for a while. Prashanth Krishnaswami, who is the Global Head of Market Strategy and Thought Leadership - CX at Zoho Corp, told AIM that the company has already identified some use cases across the board. 

“For instance, generative AI can help sales and support personnel compose elegant responses to customers; it can summarize a long history of a customer's relationship for a new employee who's taking over that relationship; it can help coach employees and make them more effective at communicating complex ideas and situations; it can generate variations of messaging for A/B or multivariate tests run by marketers. Generative AI can also help write uniform, consistent product descriptions to use in commerce. All of this is just around language. If you look at visual use cases, the possibilities expand much farther,” said Krishnaswami. 

Zoho is already offering some generative AI capabilities across Zoho CRM, Zoho Desk and other Customer Experience (CX) solutions. Some prominent examples include: Ask Zia, Zoho's AI assistant that consumes a prompt from the user and constructs a business dashboard or a KPI report based on it; Zia Presentations, an AI assistant that constructs presentations automatically based on a data set; Zia Activity Extraction, to automatically identify and record business activities like calls, meetings, and schedules. 

Also Read: Microsoft’s AI Advantage Puts Pressure on Salesforce, Zoho to Innovate

Zoho’s efforts also come in the background of its competitors already announcing the integration of new capabilities. Microsoft recently announced the launch of Dynamic 365 Copilot, which will use generative AI for business solutions spanning both CRM and ERP. The new AI capabilities will power the next era of business applications – including Teams, Viva Sales, and Power Apps. 

Meanwhile, at the TrailblazerDX 2023 event, Salesforce also announced the integration of EinsteinGPT, which will offer AI for CRM. This, in addition to launching a new $250 million generative AI fund to focus on responsible generativeAI, which will be invested in companies like Anthropic, Cohere, Hearth.AI, and You.com.