ZOHO'S AI GAMBIT

The company sharpens its AI game and scales global reach, aligning bold ambitions with accelerated growth.

- By RUKMINI RAO

FOLLOWERS OF @svembu, the X handle of Sridhar Vembu, co-founder and now the chief scientist at Zoho Corp., are used to posts with strong viewpoints, sometimes polarising, never apologetic. Transitioning to a new role at Zoho earlier this year, Vembu has a lot to say about the future of software productivity in GenAI or Generative AI.

“The initial hype, say six months ago, was that AI would take over all the software jobs. Now it has cooled off a little bit. It’s clear that it’s not going to happen anytime, immediately,” says Vembu, whose company AdventNet acquired the domain Zoho. com in early 2000 and rebranded itself to Zoho Corp. in 2009.

Being at arm’s length from the daily grind has given him the required focus to think about it. With a focussed team of 40 people, on a day-to-day basis, Vembu collaborates closely with 20-25 of them from his workplace in Silarai-puravu village in Tamil Nadu’s Tenkasi district, close to the Kerala border. His work currently revolves around the intersection of old and new technologies and humans. His goal: to achieve reliable, compliant, secure software for 10X productivity gains.

The group roadmap

What brings in the moolah is Zoho Corp.'s “legacy” ManageEngine started in 2002 and the Cloud division Zoho.com, which offers business workflow and collaboration products, started in 2005. The group is now digging into AI to fill a few blanks in its B2B offerings and build a common AI infrastructure that all business verticals can use and learn from one another.

Take, for instance, its recent free offering of the messaging app Arattai, touted as the Made-in-India alternative to Meta’s WhatsApp. When Zoho Corp. soft launched it in 2021, it made no waves. In September, downloads surged briefly when Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan endorsed Arattai, followed by some colleagues. The surge lasted only a few days.