Show Notes:

In this episode of "AI with Maribel Lopez," host Maribel Lopez sits down with Vijay Sundaram, Chief Strategy Officer at Zoho, at Zoho Day 25 in Austin, Texas. They discuss Zoho's strategic evolution and approach to AI.

Key Highlights:

• Zoho's Market Evolution: Vijay explains how Zoho has expanded from primarily serving small and medium businesses to increasingly being adopted by larger enterprise customers worldwide. This evolution has happened naturally as their products became more sophisticated and larger customers discovered them.
• Enterprise Adaptation Challenges: To serve enterprise customers, Zoho had to make changes in three areas:
  1. Technology (their strength as a product-driven company)
  2. Operations (building expertise in account management, solutions consulting, etc.)
  3. Transitioning from an inbound to outbound business model
• AI Implementation Strategy: Vijay clarifies that while generative AI has recently captured public attention, Zoho has been implementing various AI technologies (machine learning, NLP, video recognition) for over a decade. Much of this AI has been "headless" - working behind the scenes in applications rather than through conversational interfaces.
• Three Levels of AI: Zoho approaches AI implementation through:
  1. Contextual AI within business applications
  2. Interactive AI for specific purposes
  3. Expert-level insights that enable non-experts to gain valuable business intelligence
• Platform Approach: By integrating applications and creating a comprehensive platform, Zoho can leverage data across domains (finance, sales, HR, operations) to provide more valuable AI-driven insights.
• AI Market Shift: Vijay predicts that AI differentiation will increasingly move from foundational models to the application layer, where companies like Zoho can add value through their access to business data across domains.
• Privacy and Security: Zoho maintains a strong stance on privacy (no trackers on their websites) and has built a "trust layer" into their platform to ensure proper data access controls for AI interactions.