'We're not Chasing the AI Hype

Zoho's new CEO Mani Vembu shares insights into building Zia LLM, the shift toward agentic AI, learnings from Sridhar Vembu and more

- By NAINI THAKER

IN EARLY 2025, MANI VEMBU took over the reins from his brother and Zoho co-founder Sridhar Vembu, who transitioned to focus on research and innovation as chief scientist. Mani's appointment as CEO marks a new chapter for the Chennai-headquartered SaaS firm, as it doubles down on platform-driven growth and enterprise adoption.

One of the most significant milestones under his leadership has been the launch of Zia LLM, Zoho's proprietary large language model, trained entirely in-house and tailored for specific business use cases.

This move reflects Zoho's long-term commitment to building AI capabilities that are cost-efficient, privacy-conscious, and deeply integrated into its product ecosystem. With 32 percent year-on-year growth in India, driven largely by inbound interest from larger enterprises, Zoho is now looking to replicate its success globally.

In a conversation with Forbes India, Mani Vembu shares insights into Zoho's AI strategy, the shift toward agentic AI, and why decentralisation remains central to the company's leadership philosophy. Edited excerpts:

Q Why did you build Zia LLM from scratch? And what makes it stand out?

Most public LLMs are consumer-focussed. At Zoho, we initially used and hosted open-source LLMs, which gave us insights into the infrastructure, investment, and optimisation required. We realised that smaller models (such as 3B, 7B parameters) could be optimised for specific business use cases like summarisation across emails, support tickets, etc. without needing massive models.

So, we built three different LLMs—1.3B, 2.6B, and 7B parameters—each trained for specific enterprise use cases. These models are not open to customers directly but are integrated into Zoho's products via agents and prompts. This makes Zia LLM an enterprise-grade model, optimised for cost and power efficiency, and tailored to Zoho's ecosystem.