Zoho launches free AI tools to support easier business adoption

Zoho has introduced a set of free AI tools aimed at helping businesses use artificial intelligence more effectively. The new features are built into Zoho’s Collaboration, Customer Experience, and Human Resources products. The company said the tools are designed to address common issues that make AI adoption difficult, such as high costs and complicated setup processes.

The new tools use Zoho’s existing platform to connect data across different applications. They can perform tasks that involve multiple products, such as creating agreements from text files and PDFs, checking employee availability before scheduling meetings, or identifying potential sales leads from emails.

In Zoho Workplace, the collaboration platform, users can now give complex commands through “Ask Zia,” an AI assistant that can carry out actions across several apps. For instance, it can find specific emails, summarise their content into a document, and share it with a colleague. Zoho Tables adds tools that build databases from user prompts and analyse text for keywords, sentiment, or language.

In Zoho Desk, the customer support platform, new AI agents record and summarise ticket resolutions. This information can be reused to handle similar issues in the future.

Zoho Recruit, the company’s hiring software, now includes AI features that compare job descriptions with resumes to suggest suitable matches. It can also generate assessments with questions, answers, and scoring systems to help recruiters evaluate applicants.

"Industry AI adoption has been hampered by a lack of data readiness, difficulty in integrating with legacy systems, and unnecessarily high costs passed down to the consumer," says Mani Vembu, CEO, Zoho. "Because Zoho is built on a single, internally-developed tech stack, incorporating agents into daily business operations requires nothing from the business: no adding third-party tools, no extra time, and significantly, no extra costs."