Zoho Corporation has announced execution plans and ongoing investment in AI, beginning with the launch of 13 generative AI Zoho application extensions and integrations, powered by ChatGPT. Zoho’s developing AI strategy includes platform expansion and its innovation roadmap with a focus on delivering superior customer experience and value while ensuring the highest level of customer privacy and security. For over a decade, Zoho has been executing and implementing AI (Zia) across its product portfolio, developing in-house technology running on the company’s private cloud.

“The fusion of ChatGPT’s generative AI with our homegrown AI features will provide users with a more intuitive, efficient, and secure experience, reflecting Zoho’s deep R&D-first culture,” said Veerakumar Natarajan, Country Head, Zoho Kenya. “As a technology partner, Zoho’s customers continue to rely on us for keeping them ahead of the curve while retaining core tenets like privacy, which they have come to respect. We will continue to deliver on this promise without compromise.

Kenya ranked fifth in Africa on the government’s readiness to implement Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the delivery of services to the public, according to the 2022 edition of the annual Government AI Readiness Index released by Oxford Insights. The report showed Kenya’s overall score of 40.36 percent, placing it behind Egypt, South Africa, Tunisia, and Morocco, while on the technology sector pillar that examines the availability of requisite skills to enable AI adoption, the country posted a dismal score of 28.76 percent, which is below the world average of 35.17 percent. “This is a positive indicator for the Kenyan market, and businesses need to tap into the full potential of Artificial Intelligence so as to improve their customer experiences, privacy, and productivity,” concludes Natarajan.

The following are the three core tenets of Zoho’s AI strategy:

? Customer Experience: Zoho’s AI solutions deliver the context, intelligence, and efficiency necessary to produce exemplary experience. Zia is woven into the fabric of each step, be it enhancing customer records, producing documents, providing insights into processes or proactively forecasting, and preparing for user issues that might arise.

? Customer Privacy: Zoho builds its AI in-house, resulting in optimal privacy protection that effortlessly unifies with users’ greater technology ecosystems. Tools powered by Zoho’s AI extensions deliver intelligence without compromising customer data or sending information to an unverified third party.

? Customer Value: Zoho delivers multifaceted value in the form of customer productivity, ease of use, cost, relevant KPIs, and making AI widely available to a broad set of people.

AI Roadmap and Vision

In the short term, Zoho will facilitate Zia’s integration with third-party intelligence, bringing the newest technology into the company’s broad portfolio of business solutions. As Zoho progresses, the company intends to take generative AI technology in-house, ensuring its 90 million global users benefit from intelligent experiences as well as Zoho’s leading value and privacy standards. In addition, Zoho is currently developing proprietary Learning Language Models (LLMs) capable of conversing, summarising, paraphrasing, and adapting to new tasks with zero-shot learning techniques, empowering seamless AI-driven communication and knowledge discovery.

Generative AI in Zoho Applications

Available in its marketplace, Zoho’s new generative AI extensions, powered by ChatGPT, complement the broad portfolio of AI technology Zoho already supports. This new technology has been contextually integrated into Zoho’s applications and can be leveraged right away by users:

• Zoho CRM with Generative AI can extract important information from customer records, predict deal outcomes, create custom emails and templates, and check for grammatical errors.
• Zoho Analytics with Generative AI allows users to import public datasets, blend them with business data, and create SQL queries from natural language.
• Zoho Desk with Generative AI can summarise tickets, analyze customer tone, generate replies from a knowledge base, and track down solutions.
• Zoho Writer with Generative AI can suggest headlines, fix punctuation and shorten content, and integrate answers to user questions.
• Zoho Mail with Generative AI can create multiple versions of emails, highlight action items, and generate email summaries.
• Zoho Cliq with Generative AI can paraphrase messages, transform threads into outlines, and shorten responses.
• Zoho Social with Generative AI can produce engaging content, suggest relevant supporting media, and optimize posts.
• Zoho Assist with Generative AI can generate shareable summaries and enhance customer service.
• Zoho LandingPage with Generative AI can create complete product-specific landing pages with forms, personalization, SEO optimization, and migration capabilities.
• Zoho SalesIQ with Generative AI can transcribe conversations, tag transcripts, review messages, and utilize ChatGPT Block in Zobot.
• Zoho Notebook with Generative AI can organize notes with automatic tagging and summarising, turn them into checklists, and provide grammar and spelling suggestions with Zoho Blue Pencil.
• Zoho DataPrep with Generative AI can find external datasets and suggest relevant formulas.
• Zoho Meeting with Generative AI allows users to index session transcripts and generate effective keynotes. 

 Availability and Pricing  

Zia is available by default in Zoho’s applications, while ChatGPT-powered integrations are available in Zoho’s Marketplace. Customers choosing to enable generative AI capabilities within Zoho’s applications may do so using their existing OpenAI account API key. Based on the number of APIs used, customers will be billed directly by OpenAI. Zoho will maintain a steady rhythm of announcing new generative AI extensions and integrations to its portfolio.

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