Artificial intelligence is transforming industries around the world, but at Zoho it is accelerating software development at an astonishing pace. In a recent post on The comment spread across the tech community, leaving everyone from CTOs to junior coders wondering what exactly Zoho is cooking up inside its labs.

Vembu, who stepped down as CEO earlier this year to focus almost entirely on research and engineering, has been increasingly vocal about how AI is reshaping the company’s internal workflows. Their latest update paints a picture of an organization where repetitive coding, complex implementations and time-consuming integrations are giving way to high-velocity growth powered by increasingly integrated AI assistants.

“AI has effectively let us do weeks’ worth of work in a single day,” he wrote, calling the change exciting and transformative.

We use AI coding tools throughout the company – with the caveat that engineers must review and approve all code and take responsibility for it. We don’t force-feed or mandate AI tools, and leave it to experienced engineers to decide how to best use AI.

with that

– Sridhar Vembu (@svembu) 12 December 2025

He added, “We don’t force-feed or mandate AI tools, and leave it to experienced engineers to decide how to best use AI.” To further explain this, Vembu gave the example of one of Zoho’s most productive engineers with over 2 decades of experience. He said, “He (the engineer) is doing some critical UI work for his product, which is very challenging to get right performance-wise. He told me he is now shipping features that would have taken him 3 weeks of work, which he completed in a day. The AI ​​needed to provide him with structure; it exposed the details, and that required him to use his experience.”

Zoho’s AI ecosystem reaches full speed

Vembu’s comments come at a time when Zoho is introducing AI enhancements into almost every corner of its vast product suite. The company’s recently launched Zia Agents platform offers autonomous digital helpers that can work across sales, HR, support and operations. With tools like Xia Agent Studio, businesses can customize or create their own AI agents without expert knowledge, bringing capabilities to small teams once reserved for enterprises with deep pockets.

Not stopping there, Zoho has expanded its low-code development environment, Zoho Creator, with CoCreator, an AI assistant designed to take natural-language signals and turn them into functional app components, data models, or even complete workflows.

Elsewhere, Zoho Analytics has received a significant upgrade with the addition of generative AI and predictive insights. The refreshed platform allows companies to automate report creation, receive relevant recommendations, and perform data analysis without the need for an expert background. It’s part of Zoho’s mission to make high-end analytics accessible to anyone who can ask intelligent questions.

All this is on top of Zoho’s broader push in adjacent markets, including the expansion of its UPI payments app in India, new investments in messaging infrastructure and new global offices, such as its first office in Tel Aviv, which opened this month to support demand in Israel and surrounding markets.

Vembu’s balanced AI message

Despite his enthusiasm, Vembu isn’t shy about acknowledging the caveats that come with increasingly autonomous systems. In a widely discussed anecdote last month, he recounted an incident in which a startup’s AI assistant accidentally leaked confidential acquisition details and then apologized itself, a moment that was equal parts funny and worrying.

He also emphasizes that although AI can handle labor-intensive tasks at extraordinary speed, it should serve as an amplifier rather than a replacement for human creativity. In interviews, Vembu has argued that society is “nowhere close” to an AI takeover of jobs, and that the real aim should be to enhance human capacity by doing the hard work on machines.