TLDR: Zoho has launched its Zia Large Language Model (LLM) in Kenya, emphasizing a unique training approach that utilizes private Kenyan customer data to deliver highly contextual and secure AI insights. This initiative, announced at Zoholics Kenya 2025, aims to accelerate AI adoption among local businesses while prioritizing data privacy, with all customer data remaining on Zoho’s servers. The company also reported significant growth in the Kenyan market, with a 39% revenue increase in 2024.
Nairobi, Kenya – Global technology giant Zoho has unveiled a significant advancement in its artificial intelligence offerings for the Kenyan market, introducing its proprietary Zia Large Language Model (LLM) with a strong focus on localized data training and stringent data privacy. The announcement, made at Zoholics Kenya 2025, underscores Zoho’s commitment to empowering local enterprises with advanced AI capabilities tailored to their specific needs.
Veerakumar Natarajan, Country Head for Zoho Kenya, highlighted the company’s long-standing engagement with AI, stating, “Zia has been around for close to 13 years now. We have been giving it to our customers. This is part of our team’s ideology or their vision.” He further explained that the Zia LLM represents Zoho’s most sophisticated effort to embed AI directly into enterprise software for the African market. The model, built and trained on NVIDIA’s AI-accelerated computing platform, initially leveraged generic public data. However, to ensure relevance and effectiveness for Kenyan businesses in a B2B context, Zoho has adopted a distinct training methodology where AI agents adapt to individual customer data.
“If you are one of our customers from Kenya, the AI agent comes with training from global data and starts to work on your data only,” Natarajan clarified. This approach, coupled with ‘Retrievable Augmented Capabilities’ (RAC), allows customers to generate results specific to their company, ensuring contextual insights across their entire product suite. A cornerstone of this strategy is data privacy and security. Natarajan stressed that Zia LLM keeps all customer data within Zoho’s servers, providing businesses with full control over their information and mitigating concerns about external data reliance. Premanand Velumani, Zoho Middle East and Africa Associate Director for Strategic Growth, reiterated this commitment, stating, “Our LLM model is trained specifically for business use cases, keeping privacy and governance at its core, which has resulted in lowering the inference cost, passing on that value to the customers, while also ensuring that they are able to utilise AI productively and efficiently.”
The Zia LLM is available in three model sizes, ranging from 1.3 billion to 7 billion parameters, with some reports indicating models up to 13 billion parameters, each optimized for contextual applicability and efficient resource management. Beyond the LLM, Zoho has introduced a suite of AI tools, including Zia Agent Studio, a no-code platform offering over 25 ready-to-deploy AI agents for tasks such as customer service triage, recruitment screening, and sales opportunity analysis. The company also unveiled a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server to facilitate secure interoperability between Zoho applications and third-party tools, alongside proprietary Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models for English and Hindi, with plans for broader language support.
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Zoho’s expansion in Kenya has been robust, with the company reporting an impressive 39% year-over-year revenue growth in 2024 and a 25% compound annual growth rate over the past three years. This growth is attributed to the increasing demand for scalable, unified business solutions and sustained strategic local investments. In 2024, Zoho expanded its local partner network by 83% and increased its Kenyan workforce by 72%. Key solutions driving adoption include Zoho One, Workplace, CRM Plus, CRM, Books, and Zoho Desk, with strong uptake across diverse sectors such as IT services, financial services, insurance, energy, manufacturing, telecommunications, retail, real estate, and construction. Zoho plans a full rollout of Zia LLM to customers in late 2025, with internal testing currently underway.
