Zoho Announces Major Evolution of Zoho Analytics Platform
With this evolution, Zoho Analytics brings data analysis, business context, AI-powered insights, and agent-driven workflows together in one platform.
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Zoho Corporation, a global technology company, has 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 analysing 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,” said Tony Thomas, CEO of Zoho USA.
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“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 modelling its structure on an organisation’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 organisation’s operations.
The ontology layer models business entities, their relationships, and how they connect across the organisation, 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, visualisation, data preparation, coding and SQL generation.
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A central agent plans and orchestrates specialised 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, organisations 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 standardises descriptions, synonyms, instructions, and metrics. This ensures AI is fluent in the language of an organisation and can properly interpret its findings. Zoho Analytics includes support for multiple semantic models for different contexts.
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- 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 specialised sub-agents for data analysis, visualisation, data preparation, modelling, coding, and SQL generation. Ask Zia works within an organisation’s ontology and semantic layer, retains conversation history and agent memory, and allows organisations 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 organisation’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.
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- 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 organisations 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 visualisation. 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
Organisations can embed agents in their own apps, portals, and products with white labelling. 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 organisation:
- Data Catalog
A unified catalogue 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 organisations monitor and manager AI adoption. - Sandbox and Deployment Management
Teams can develop and test analytics artefacts and agents in a sandbox, publish to production when ready, and roll back to previous versions if necessary.
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“We’ve had tremendous success with Zoho Analytics, using data to improve visibility, drive accountability, and support better business decisions across our organisation. 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 organisations 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 visualisations, 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.
