As I have posted over the years, Zoho keeps improving their ZohoDay for media and analysts. This year they are also pioneering a series of 30 minute virtual AI Forums. They have hosted 3 so far, and they are well attended and feature 10-15 minute, crisp presentations on a specific topic, followed by analyst Q&A. Sandy Lo runs a tight ship and each one has run on time and she sends the recording, copy of the slides soon after.
I think of them as comparable to Shakespeare in the Park or concerts most towns host in the summer. Each is slightly different and have a casual, friendly vibe.
The first one focused on the Zoho Creator product. Developer productivity is turning out to be one of the best use cases for the current wave of GenAI innovations. Creator, first introduced in 2006 has always focused on low-code - simplifying and speeding up the app development process. Zoho says they have enabled users to launch millions of apps. Raju Vegesna, Zoho's Chief Evangelist says "AI allows us to take it to another level, shortening the time from an idea to an app. Today's announcement raises the baseline on speed of quality app creation with deep capabilities, without adding costs."
The second one was a medley and I particularly enjoyed a quick update from "Siva" Iswaran about the launch of Zoho Payments. The slide below is ambitious enough but as he said there is much more (he had given me a preview here) as it also allows them to support the Receipts side and Order to Cash process, it allows them to play more in the Fintech vertical and expand their global footprint as countries introduce new payment protocols, eInvoicing, taxes, anti-money laundering and other regulations. Now you may ask what does that have to do with AI? To me agentic AI will only be as good as the domain expertise of vendor developers and unique training data they have available specific to occupations and tasks. Very few vendors have localized functionality for more than a handful of countries.
The third one, yesterday, was about Zoho Hubs which is focused on making unstructured data more easily accessible to its AI and other analytical capabilities. For now, it focuses on text based data which is scattered across email threads, audio and video conversations, contract documents and other formats. In many enterprises that comprises 80% of all data and is lost in the "fog"
I hope Zoho continues this format and other vendors also adopt it. It allows for exposing a new gen of agentic apps while also showing improvements to more traditional transactional capabilities. And it is good practice for a new generation of vendor employees to present to and react to analyst questions.
BTW I used the Summer Concert analogy with the surfer’s definition of summer – an endless one😊
Look forward to more episodes.
