Zoho launches Zia Chat as an AI interface across its applications

Zoho announced Zia Chat on September 23, 2026, an AI interface built into Zoho's business applications and extensible to outside systems through MCP integrations. According to the release, users can find information, understand context and take action across sales, marketing, support, HR and finance from one conversation, such as reviewing an account's interactions, summarizing support issues and payment history, preparing a presentation in Zoho Show and drafting a follow-up email. Users can apply Skills, switch between role-based Profiles and delegate multi-step work to Zia Agents. Zoho also announced vertical SaaS offerings across seven industries.

The details

• Zia Chat is model-agnostic, so organizations can choose the LLMs that power it.
• It can only access information and actions available to the user, and actions requiring approval remain with the authorized approver.
• Responses can link back to the underlying records, and Zoho says data accessed by Zia Chat is not used to train its AI models.
• The seven verticals are retail, automotive, BFSI, healthcare, education, real estate and restaurants, including Zoho RetailIQ, a CRM for physical retail.
• Zoho reports revenue in India grew 47% year over year in 2025.

Context

This is the third Zoho item in our coverage, following Zoho CRM updates in January 2026 (address suggestions and proximity planning in India) and March 2026 (Workqueue, Zia formula generation and more LLM options). Zia Chat extends Zia across Zoho's broader application suite, including sales, marketing, support, HR and finance apps, and the same announcement marked Zoho's entry into industry-specific vertical SaaS applications.

Not disclosed

• Pricing for Zia Chat
• Availability dates and regions
• Which Zoho editions include Zia Chat
• Which LLM providers are supported