Saran B. Paramisvam, Regional Director MEA at Zoho, in a conversation with Techitup ME highlights, how Zoho is shaping business automation with AI Solutions; new Zia Agents, Agent Studio, and regional partnerships
Zoho recently unveiled its new AI solutions, can you walk us through Zia Agents, Agent Studio, and Agent Marketplace?
Zoho, with its decade-long investment in AI and deep regional presence, is emerging as a key player. Zoho’s journey with AI began in 2015 with Zia, an intelligent assistant that was designed to provide contextual insights across its suite of applications.
Over the years, Zia evolved from offering prescriptive recommendations and now, with Agentic AI, it can autonomously execute workflows, make decisions, and manage multi-step processes through Zia Agents. Unlike traditional chatbots or rule-based automation, these agents understand context, learn from interactions, and take independent actions. They are not just reactive but proactive, reducing mundane tasks and allowing employees to focus on strategic work.
On the other hand, Agent Studio has helped businesses overcome the barrier of finding customized solutions. With Agent Studio, partners, developers, and even non-technical users in the Middle East can build custom AI agents for niche use cases.
To further accelerate adoption, Zoho also launched an Agent Marketplace where businesses can access pre-built agents for common functions and discover AI solutions tailored for regional compliance, including regulations like Saudi PDPL or UAE data laws. This ecosystem ensures that enterprises—especially SMEs lacking in-house AI expertise—can quickly deploy AI without incurring heavy capital or operational expenditures.
Agentic AI is a relatively new and exciting field. How is Zoho leveraging it differently than traditional AI models?
In the last decade, AI capabilities have evolved from automation and reactive outputs. Businesses are now preparing for the next frontier, Agentic AI, which is a paradigm in AI maturity where AI proactively and autonomously makes decisions, executes workflows, and adapts to dynamic business needs.
As MENA enterprises navigate this new era, there is an increased focus on how to use AI intelligently and ethically. Instead of making hasty decisions in fear of missing out, businesses must pause to evaluate not just the technology, but also the vendor—to see if they follow ethical and transparent practices, respect privacy, and comply with data sovereignty. This would allow them to future-proof their investment, for sooner or later, legislation will catch up with this rapidly evolving technology.
How does Zoho ensure that Zia’s agentic capabilities remain ethical, secure, and transparent?
Zoho has an ethical and secure environment by design. Unlike many AI models that rely on external LLMs (posing data privacy risks), Zoho’ agents keep data within the customer’s environment. Similarly, agents created by external contributors who publish on the marketplace undergo strict moderation before entering the Marketplace, ensuring compliance with laws such as Saudi PDPL, GDPR, and other regulations.
While agents are designed to act autonomously, Zoho’s AI offering ensures businesses can still retain approval workflows, audit logs, and override capabilities for a degree of human oversight. This balances efficiency with accountability, which can be an important factor for enterprises in critical sectors such as banking, healthcare, and government.
How is Zoho supporting or aligning with KSA’s Vision 2030 goals, can you reveal the level of investments in the region?
The Middle East is a strategic growth region for Zoho, particularly Saudi Arabia, where digital transformation is central to Vision 2030. Zoho’s investments reflect this commitment, where it has allocated SAR 500 million towards digital infrastructure, including two local data centres in Riyadh and Jeddah to ensure data sovereignty. The company has earmarked SAR 100 million annually in cloud credits for SMEs in partnership with MCIT and Monsha’at helping businesses adopt Zoho’s tools at minimal cost. Through these collaborations with Saudi government entities, Zoho also provides professional upskilling to local talents through institutions like Monsha’at Academy and Thakaa Centre.
Can you talk about specific partnerships, collaborations across KSA and broader Middle East region?
Beyond KSA, Zoho is expanding in the UAE, Egypt, Bahrain, and Qatar, with plans to further localize AI solutions for Arabic-speaking markets. As businesses in Saudi Arabia, the UAE and beyond embrace AI, Zoho’s long-term investments, ethical framework, and partner ecosystem position it as more than a vendor—but as a trusted enabler of the region’s digital ambitions.
