Zoho Brings Trusted Business Intelligence to AI Agents in Zoho Analytics Platform Evolution, Connecting Data, Business Context, Insights and Action

• Trusted intelligence: Zoho Analytics serves as the intelligence layer for businesses, grounding AI agents in trusted data and business context and extending intelligence across the Zoho app ecosystem
• Built on business context: Native semantic and ontology layers help AI agents understand business data, relationships, metrics and priorities
• From Data to Insights and Actions: AI super agent orchestrates specialized agents for data analysis, preparation, modeling, visualization and coding through a single interface
• Strict governance and security controls provides oversight across the whole chain, from raw data to agent answers, from one place

AUSTIN, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Zoho Corporation, a global technology company, today announced a major evolution of Zoho Analytics into an Agentic Analytics platform, extending its established analytics and reporting capabilities with a trusted intelligence layer for business insights and AI-driven action. By bringing together data, business context, analytics, and AI agents, the platform enables businesses to move from analyzing data to understanding what it means and to act on those insights. Native semantic and ontology layers provide the business context that powers a multi-agent version of Ask Zia and enables intelligence to extend across business analytics, agents, apps, and workflows.

"We are at the beginning of the next leap forward in data analytics, where a strong data foundation is the starting point for all agentic activity in business operations," says Tony Thomas, CEO of Zoho USA. "Agents, however, cannot function only with data, but require a robust intelligence layer. Today's updates to Zoho Analytics provide that and more: one open and extensible trusted intelligence layer that gives every AI tool in your business the context, metrics, and governance to deliver answers users can rely on."

Zoho Analytics finely tunes its data intelligence by modeling its structure on an organization's data. The semantic layer serves as a business glossary for AI, defining key terms, metrics and their meaning, helping AI interpret data in the context of an organization's operations. The ontology layer models business entities, their relationships, and how they connect across the organization, helping AI generate insights and recommendations that are relevant to the real business needs. With strict governance and clear oversight into each step of its process, Zoho Analytics helps businesses manage data access, cost, reduce errors and maintain control over how information is used by agents, in this nascent AI regulatory landscape.

The intelligence layer delivers trusted, repeatable and pervasive intelligence, enabling agentic AI to ask, understand, decide, and act based on highly informed data, tailored to each unique business. Ask Zia, a conversational super-agent for Business Intelligence is built with a multi-agent architecture across data analysis, data modelling, visualization, data preparation, coding and SQL generation. A central agent plans and orchestrates takes specialized sub-agents, all working off the same semantic layer, ontology and conversation context. This enables users to move naturally between tasks — for example, starting with an analysis and then creating a data pipeline to prepare data for further use — without losing the context of the conversation. For specific functions, users can build custom agents that are grounded with the same data, semantic model and knowledge base as Ask Zia. With support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), these agents can connect with external tools and systems, in addition to built-in tools from Zoho Analytics.

With this evolution, Zoho Analytics brings data analysis, business context, AI-powered insights, and agent-driven workflows together in one platform, helping businesses move from data to decisions and action with greater confidence.

Business Context for Trusted Intelligence

Zoho Analytics calibrates itself to the way a business operates using three distinct tools:

• The Ontology Layer
  By leveraging provided tools to model their canonical business units and describing how those entities relate to one another, organizations can provide AI with a structured understanding of the business—helping AI generate insights and recommendations that are relevant and reliable, addressing real business needs and ensuring results are tailored precisely to achievable outcomes and tied directly to process.
• The Semantic Layer
  Users can produce a business glossary for AI that standardizes descriptions, synonyms, instructions, and metrics. This ensures AI is fluent in the language of an organization and can properly interpret its findings. Zoho Analytics includes support for multiple semantic models for different contexts.
• More Connectors Than Ever
  Zoho Analytics adds more than 30 new data connectors to the 500-plus already available. New connectors expand Zoho integrations by adding support for Zoho ERP, Zoho Spend, Zoho FSM, Zoho Shifts and Zoho Voice; other connectors expand interoperability to include SAP, PayPal, Adobe Commerce, Twilio, Notion, Intercom, Supabase, Amazon DocumentDB, and AlloyDB, bringing relevant data into Zoho Analytics for analysis and insights.

Unlike competitors, the semantic and ontology layers are native to Zoho Analytics, and arrive in the box, not requiring a separate data platform or cloud data warehouse. Users can create multiple semantic models for different contexts, so finance and operations departments each get the definitions that fit their work. Apache Ossie compatibility means that a company's definitions are portable, and not locked inside of Zoho. Businesses can build and edit semantic models without code.

Flexible Super Agents, Finely Attuned

• Ask Zia
  Zoho's conversational agent for business intelligence, natively integrated into Zoho products, has adopted a multi-agent architecture with six pre-built specialized sub-agents for data analysis, visualization, data preparation, modeling, coding, and SQL generation. Ask Zia works within an organization's ontology and semantic layer, retains conversation history and agent memory, and allows organizations to choose Zia’s own large language model or bring their own frontier model.
• Custom agents
  Teams can build their own data agents that remain grounded in an organization’s data, semantic model, and knowledge base. These agents connect to Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, web search, and other tools inside or outside Zoho Analytics, and can be distributed with governance and observability controls.
• Agentic actions
  Agents can trigger actions and workflows directly. Powerful workflows can be designed with a workflow builder in Zoho Analytics.

Portable Intelligence for Agents, Apps, and Workflows

Zoho Analytics extends its intelligence beyond its own interface, enabling developers and organizations to use its analytics capabilities and business context across external agents, applications, and workflows.

• Headless BI
  Developers and agents can build agentic solutions over the Zoho Analytics MCP server, available in remote and local options, with tools for data analysis, data preparation, and visualization. A new command-line interface (CLI) is included, and users can work with Zoho Analytics from inside Claude through a Claude plug-in.
• Embedded AI
  Organizations can embed agents in their own apps, portals, and products with white labeling. Permissions and governance remain intact wherever the agents run.

Built-In Governance and Oversight

Zoho Analytics gives administrators visibility into, and control over, how agents operate across the organization:

• Data Catalog
  A unified catalog of data, metrics, analytics assets, and models offers lineage and impact analysis, broad search options, and management of data and access policies.
• AI Observability
  Administrators can see which agents ran, who used them, what they accessed, and how they answered queries. AI usage and cost tracking across teams, along with administrative controls for Ask Zia, helps organizations monitor and manager AI adoption.
• Sandbox and Deployment Management
  Teams can develop and test analytics artifacts and agents in a sandbox, publish to production when ready, and roll back to previous versions if necessary.

"We've had tremendous success with Zoho Analytics, using data to improve visibility, drive accountability, and support better business decisions across our organization. What excites us about this next evolution is the ability to combine data, business context, and AI into a single intelligence layer. These new capabilities align closely with our AI strategy, which is focused on turning information into action, helping our people make better decisions faster, improve productivity, and spend more time creating value for our customers." - David Fauser, VP Sales, Marketing & Strategy, CIMCO Refrigeration

“With this release, Zoho is bringing together several elements needed for scalable, governed agentic analytics, including native semantic and ontology layers, governance and observability capabilities, and the option to deploy these agentic capabilities either embedded in applications or headless via MCP. Its stated commitment to openness and interoperability should help organizations leverage context-grounded insights.” — Megha Kumar, Research VP, Analytics and AI, IDC

Additional Capabilities

Zoho Analytics includes more than 50 new capabilities beyond its agentic features. These include more than 10 new visualizations, custom visuals, and pixel-perfect reports; predictive tools such as scenario analysis, a correlation matrix, and a VARX forecasting model; a data science studio with Jupyter notebooks, PMML import, and expanded analysis types; and Ask Zia in mobile with an upgraded interface.

Zoho Analytics is used by 100,000 businesses worldwide daily and is available on Zoho Cloud, on-premises; on public cloud infrastructure including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud; and in hybrid deployments.

For a complete description of what's new to Zoho Analytics, visit https://www.zoho.com/analytics/whats-new.html.

What’s Next

Today's updates lays the foundation for the next iteration of Zoho Analytics, with more to come. Future enhancements include:

• From designed to dynamic business context: the "designed context" from the semantic and ontological layers will expand into "dynamic business context," continually observing how business data changes over time, providing even more trusted outcomes.
• Decision intelligence: As Zoho Analytics observes actions triggered through agents, the outcomes observed will provide deep Decision Intelligence, further serving as another context for Agentic AI.
• Greater openness and interoperability: Zoho Analytics will continue to invest in open standards, following the Apache Ossie specification as it matures, integrating with Semantic Models defined in other third party platforms, and bringing more of the Analytics platform to outside agents via MCP.
• Becoming a full Unified Data Platform: Zoho Analytics will serve as the foundation for the upcoming Data platform that brings together a data lakehouse (supporting both structured and unstructured data), data integration, data preparation, business context, analytics, data science, packaged business models (Cx360, CMDP), and agent building. Deeper integration across the Zoho ecosystem with help establish the upcoming Data Platform as a common data and intelligence infrastructure for agentic AI.

Pricing and Availability

Despite extensive updates, pricing for Zoho Analytics remains unchanged. Now included in each plan are Zoho LLM credits. A Basic plan begins at $24 per month, billed annually, which covers 2 users, 0.5 million rows, and 10K Zoho LLM credits.

For full pricing, visit www.zoho.com/analytics/pricing.html.

Updates to the cloud version of Zoho Analytics are available now, with preview versions of pixel-perfect reporting, ontology and the semantic model to be rolled out globally in the next four to eight weeks.

Updates to the on-premise version of Zoho Analytics will be available in Q1 2027.

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About Zoho Corporation

With 55+ apps in nearly every major business category, Zoho Corporation is one of the world's most prolific technology companies. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, with international headquarters in Chennai, India, Zoho is privately held and profitable with 90+ offices worldwide. For more information, please visit: www.zoho.com.