Zoho adds AI capabilities to its low code dev platform

Zoho on Wednesday announced the addition of 10 AI-centric services and features within Zoho Creator, the company’s low code application development platform, that it said are part of its pledge to invest only in “AI capabilities that drive real-time, practical and secure benefits to business users.”

The expanded offerings include CoCreator, the firm’s new AI “development partner” powered by Zia, Zoho’s AI assistant, that it said in a release “facilitates faster, simpler and more intelligent app building with the use of voice and written prompts, process flows and business specification documents.”

New features also include the ability to transform unstructured data from different file types and databases into customized applications, aided by what the company described as “advanced AI-based data prep capabilities that remove inconsistencies and bring logical structure to detail.”

In addition, users can leverage either ZohoAI or OpenAI to develop applications using prompts, process flow diagrams, or systems documentation, and, it said, “automatically generate contextual code blocks tailored to application requirements and structure.”

Shashi Bellamkonda, principal research director at Info-Tech Research Group, said, “there is a dichotomy in the use and access to AI. While anyone with a browser has access to an LLM, creating custom applications has largely been inaccessible to regular business users and has needed the intervention of technology.”

Zoho, he said, “is not new to AI and has been working on it for some time. Zoho Creator is a step in the right direction for business users to create their own apps within the organization, with built-in guardrails that may ease concerns from CxOs, especially around allocating precious data science resources to be used for simple custom applications.”

Bellamkonda added, “‘I love writing detailed documentation,’ said nobody, and tools like Zoho’s CoCreator can assist in automating software requirement creation and may potentially do a better job than any bored human being and not miss anything; [there’s] less spreadsheet wrangling.”

 It is, he said, “aimed at improving developer productivity, but I also see clear use cases for business users using CoCreator, [as well as] finance, marketing, and sales teams creating their own mini-CRMs. Reducing development cycles within enterprises will be a huge cost-saving using tools like Zoho CoCreator.”

The company, said Bellamkonda, “has shared its stance on responsible AI, noting that its models are not trained on customer data, which aligns with the privacy and compliance concerns of CIOs and CTOs. [Its] pricing models, which are typically designed with accessibility in mind, may appeal to customers and attract organizations of various sizes.”

That said, he pointed out, “adoption beyond developers and technical teams will be a challenge, as non-tech users are not used to creating their own apps. Zoho will have to continue to reach out and educate end users by collaborating with their technology buyers.”

Used effectively, “this could lead to measurable productivity gains within organizations,” Bellamkonda said.” Zoho is an outlier, as they own their tech stack and do not have the pressure of external funding, which means the economics of doing business with Zoho may be an advantage.”

Bharath Kumar, head of marketing and CX, Zoho Creator, said during a press and analyst briefing that since its launch in 2006, Creator has been “a reflection of market trends, initially acting as an online database when cloud was starting up, ensuring anytime, anywhere access of data was possible.”

Now, he said, “we are at a paradigm shift, at a point where the impact is coming from AI. [It] empowers everyone, it makes the whole process easy, and it is enabling users to build powerful applications.”

Info-Tech’s Bellamkonda added that the fact that CoCreator, which now is part of customers’ existing Creator subscriptions, is so user-friendly is paramount. “In my opinion it should be used by citizen developers more than regular developers,” he said. “[For the latter], it will make their job easier, but it’s powerful for [for the former] because they can do something themselves instead of having to go through a whole process.”