Zoho, an enterprise software corporation with 100 million users in 150+ countries, will release its newly built large language model, Zia LLM (large language model), to customers in Kenya, Nigeria, and other African markets by the end of 2025, integrating it across its enterprise applications at no additional cost.
“Customers will not pay any extra cost for Zia LLM. Zia has also been developed fully internally without a third-party model,” Premanand Velumani, Associate Director, Strategic Growth, Zoho MEA, told at a Zoholics conference held in Nairobi on Friday.
The launch marks a shift in how software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers deliver artificial intelligence (AI) in emerging markets. Instead of generic models, Zoho is building and tuning its own for specific enterprise tasks, keeping full control of the tech and data. For African firms with growing interest in AI, tight budgets, and strict data rules, it could ease adoption.
Zia LLM, built on NVIDIA’s AI platform, is trained for Zoho-specific tasks, including data extraction, summarisation, RAG, and code generation. It comes in three sizes—1.3 billion, 2.6 billion, and 7 billion parameters—each tuned for different contexts to balance performance and computing needs. Larger models are planned by late 2025, Velumani said.
Zia is currently being tested internally across Zoho’s application portfolio. While Zoho supports other LLMs, including ChatGPT, Llama, and DeepSeek, Zia LLM processes data entirely on Zoho’s servers, avoiding the transfer of sensitive information to third-party AI cloud providers.
Zoho has not specified which applications in Africa will first feature Zia LLM, or whether the rollout will be phased. Its integration could extend AI capabilities to widely used tools for customer relationship management (CRM), analytics, finance, and human resources (HR) without separate licencing or additional setup.
Zoho began embedding AI into its applications in 2017. Zia LLM represents its most advanced step yet toward making AI a core feature of enterprise software in Africa.
In Kenya, Zoho’s revenues grew by 39% in 2024 compared to 2023, according to Veerakumar Natarajan, country director, Kenya. The company declined to share specific figures.
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