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Zoho Boasts 39% Growth in Kenya, Unveils Homegrown Zia LLM and Expands AI Agent Ecosystem.

   Veerakumar Natarajan, Country Head for  Zoho Kenya.

Nairobi, Kenya, August 8, 2025.

Global technology company Zoho reported impressive 39% year-over-year revenue growth in Kenya for 2024, driven by surging demand for scalable, unified solutions and substantial local investment. The announcement, made during the Zoholics Kenya user conference in Nairobi, coincided with the launch of a significant expansion to Zoho’s AI capabilities, headlined by its proprietary large language model, Zia LLM.  

Zoho’s sustained commitment to Kenya is evident in its 25% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over the past three years. In 2024 alone, the company expanded its local partner network by 83% and grew its Kenyan workforce by 72%. Key products fueling adoption include;  Zoho One, Workplace, CRM Plus, Books, and Zoho Desk, serving vital sectors like IT services, financial services, manufacturing, and telecommunications.  

Central to Zoho’s AI strategy is the launch of  Zia LLM, a fully in-house developed large language model built on NVIDIA’s accelerated computing platform. Designed specifically for business use cases with privacy and governance as core tenets, Zia LLM offers three model sizes; 1.3B, 2.6B, and 7B parameters optimized for tasks like data extraction, summarization, RAG, and code generation. Crucially, Zia LLM allows customers to leverage advanced AI while keeping their data securely on Zoho’s servers, avoiding transmission to external cloud providers, a key differentiator that also reduces inference costs. The model is currently in internal testing across Zoho’s app portfolio and will be available to customers soon, with plans to scale model sizes starting late 2025.  

Complementing Zia LLM, Zoho unveiled a comprehensive suite to democratize AI agent creation and deployment. Over 25 pre-built, context-aware agents are now embedded directly within Zoho products. Examples include a Customer Service Agent for Zoho Desk that processes and triages requests; Ask Zia, the platform-wide assistant now enhanced with BI skills for data professionals; a Candidate Screener; a Deal Analyser; and a Revenue Growth Specialist. The Zia Agent Studio provides a significantly simplified, primarily prompt-based, with a low-code option, no-code builder, enabling users to create agents leveraging over 700 pre-built actions. These agents can be deployed autonomously or triggered in various ways, and can even be provisioned as "digital employees" adhering to organizational permissions. A Zia Agents Marketplace serves as a hub for deploying these agents, with plans to soon allow partners and developers to contribute.  

Further enabling this ecosystem is the Model Context Protocol (MCP), now in early access, which allows secure interaction with workflows across 15+ Zoho apps, extendable to third-party tools via Zoho Flow. Zoho also launched proprietary Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models for English and Hindi, boasting up to 75% better performance than competitors at low computational load, with more languages planned. Future developments include adding finance and support skills to Ask Zia and implementing an Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol for cross-platform collaboration.  

Executives emphasized Zoho’s unique approach. Veerakumar Natarajan, Country Head for Zoho Kenya, stated, "Our differentiation comes from offering agents over our low code platform so that there is a human in the loop for verification and modification, co-creation with the AI agent. It’s simpler to verify output via UI than code." Premanand Velumani, Associate Director, Strategic Growth Zoho MEA, added, "Zia LLM is trained for business, keeping privacy and governance core. This lowers costs, passing value to customers, while ensuring productive AI use. Developing entirely in-house gives us strict data control for key markets like Kenya."  

Zoho's announcements underscore a major push to deliver powerful, context-aware, and privacy-centric AI tools integrated directly into business operations, particularly for growing markets.  

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