Zoho recently established monthly AI forums to help analysts keep up with their plans in the quickly evolving AI space. At its May 2025 session, Zoho provided an overview of new announcements about embedding AI across its suite of applications to improve productivity, automate workflows, and deliver better customer experiences.
These announcements illustrate Zoho’s strategy to deepen platform-wide AI integration, address enterprise security concerns, and expand into embedded fintech—all while staying true to its core values of affordability, privacy, and integrated solutions.
Here’s a peek at some of the new AI capabilities that Zoho is bringing to its solutions.
CRM for Everyone
Zoho has expanded its Customer Experience (CX) platform with new AI and workflow orchestration capabilities, driven by its in-house AI engine, Zia. At the heart of the new update is the general availability of CRM For Everyone, which extends CRM beyond sales teams to users across departments. Enhancements allow users to build, customize, and interact with CRM features using natural language prompts.
Included here are new agentic AI tools such as:
- Ask Zia for building reports, workflows, and custom modules with plain-language commands.
- Image to Canvas, which transforms images into CRM-ready designs.
Zoho also introduced Connected Records and Connected Workflows to link and coordinate work across departments like sales, onboarding, finance, and legal to provide a smooth and consistent customer experience across the buying journey.
CRM For Everyone, coupled with cross-functional tools like Connected Records and Workflows, helps break down the traditional siloed CRM model, supporting Zoho’s goal of transforming Zoho CRM from a departmental tool into a company-wide customer engagement platform.
Ulaa Enterprise
With Ulaa Enterprise, Zoho is now addressing a growing enterprise pain point: the browser as the new attack surface in a cloud-centric world where most work gets done in the browser.
Ulaa Enterprise is a secure, enterprise-grade browser that protects organizations at the browser level, without third-party tools or virtual desktops. Powered by Zia, Zoho’s AI engine, Ulaa Enterprise includes intelligent features like ZeroPhish to detect phishing threats in real time, smart website categorization, and tab organization. Ulaa works across all major desktop and mobile platforms, including Android and iOS, and is available for $1/month per device.
Ulaa Enterprise gives Zoho another potential wedge into enterprise IT departments, opening the door for more companies to view Zoho not only as an application suite provider but as a critical infrastructure partner as well.
Zoho Payments
Zoho has launched Zoho Payments in the U.S., giving users an embedded, out-of-the-box payment solution for accepting one-time and recurring payments across more than 135 currencies. The U.S. launch of Zoho Payments helps businesses streamline collections and financial processes within a secure, integrated platform. Embedded directly into Zoho Billing and other apps, Payments closes the loop on the quote-to-cash process, making payment acceptance seamless, especially for SMBs that want to avoid cobbling together third-party tools.
The solution offers:
- Support for 135+ currencies and ACH
- PCI DSS Level 1 compliance out of the box
- Customizable dashboards for real-time visibility into cash flow and payment operations
Pricing starts at 2.9% + $0.30 per domestic card transaction, with an additional 1.5% for international cards.
Payments helps Zoho close the loop on the quote-to-cash process, strengthens the company’s fintech footprint, and highlights Zoho’s intentions to keep pace in the fintech market. It should help Zoho serve as an end-to-end ERP for SMBs and enable it to compete more aggressively with the likes of Intuit and Stripe in the SMB market.
Perspective
These announcements demonstrate Zoho’s commitment to a unified platform strategy grounded in AI, integration, privacy, and price transparency. This contrasts with many competitors, who often push modular, higher-cost tools that require third-party integration.
Zoho’s integrated and natively cohesive approach offers a differentiated and attractive value proposition, especially for SMBs and other organizations that want AI-enabled, secure, and integrated platforms without sacrificing ease of use or blowing up their budgets.
© SMB Group 2025