Zoho Updates Zoho Analytics

Zoho has advanced 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 analyzing 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, in a statement. "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 modeling its structure on organizations' 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 organizations' operations. The ontology layer models business entities, their relationships, and how they connect across the organization, helping AI generate insights and recommendations. With strict governance and clear oversight into each step of its process, Zoho Analytics helps businesses manage data access, cost, errors, and control over how information is used by agents.

The intelligence layer delivers trusted, repeatable, and pervasive intelligence. Ask Zia, a conversational super-agent for business intelligence is built with a multi-agent architecture across data analysis, data modelling, visualization, data preparation, coding and SQL generation. A central agent plans and orchestrates specialized sub-agents, all working off the same semantic layer, ontology, and conversation context. 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.

Zoho Analytics now includes the following three tools:

• The Ontology Layer -- By leveraging provided tools to model their canonical business units and describing how those entities relate to one another, organizations 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 standardizes descriptions, synonyms, instructions, and metrics. Zoho Analytics includes support for multiple semantic models for different contexts.
• 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.

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.

Other features include the following:

• Ask Zia -- Zoho's conversational agent for business intelligence, natively integrated into Zoho products, has adopted a multi-agent architecture with six pre-built specialized sub-agents for data analysis, visualization, data preparation, modeling, coding, and SQL generation. Ask Zia works within organizations' ontology and semantic layer, retains conversation history and agent memory, and allows organizations 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 organizations' 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.
• Agentic actions -- Agents can trigger actions and workflows directly. Powerful workflows can be designed with a workflow builder in Zoho Analytics.
• 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 visualization. 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 -- Organizations can embed agents in their own apps, portals, and products with white labeling. Permissions and governance remain intact wherever the agents run.
• Data Catalog -- A unified catalog 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 organizations monitor and manager AI adoption.
• Sandbox and Deployment Management -- Teams can develop and test analytics artifacts and agents in a sandbox, publish to production when ready, and roll back to previous versions if necessary.

Zoho Analytics includes more than 50 new capabilities beyond its agentic features. These include more than 10 new visualizations, 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.