As Zoho enhances Zoho One's UX with AI, it Doubles Down on Human Support
I spoke with Zoho Sr. Evangelist Taylor Backman about the slew of major enhancements the comapny announced today for their Zoho One platform. For those who don't know, Zoho One is described as an "operating system for business," unifying 50+ business apps including sales, marketing, support, HR, accounting, and more—onto a single platform. It's been available since July of 2017 and has approximately 75,000 paying organizations, according to Zoho.
To check out the complete A Few Good Minutes show with Taylor for a deep dive into all that was announced go to https://youtu.be/ynRGOrNWkxw?si=scpHRHlSzYx-lioT. Below is a summary of our conversation through the eyes (or is it A-eyes...) of Gemini. But before that, here's a short clip of Taylor laying out why even in the midst of bringing a serious amount of AI investment to the Zoho One platform - including giving their AI assistant Ask Zia the ability to help their customers ask for help to a variety of information - they are investing majorly in more humans - and more human-to-human support experiences... because people are still better at certain important things than AI. And why he feels humans like the ones who work for Zoho's support team are "awesome".
Edited transcript
Taylor Backman: It's one thing to be able to have the LLM that can, you know, be that uh mode of communicating between computers and people. It's another thing to then go and find the data. It's a third thing to do cross-functional reporting. It's a fourth thing to then respect all of the permission structures that keep that data secure. So that's all being tied up.
The second aspect of Ask Zia though is it's trained on the entire Zoho knowledgebase as well. Aside from asking questions about the data, you can ask questions about the tools and how to use the tools better as well. That forms a really nice one-two punch.
Crucially though, Ask Zia, it's a button that's right next to a button to contact support. We're investing heavily in support at Zoho and in the United 
States as well. We do not feel that AI is a replacement for human-to-human support experiences. We want to provide a tool that can hopefully answer a question quickly, but we want to continue to invest heavily in our support people because they're awesome.
Frankly, they can do things that computers can't do and seem actually quite bad at it. We're happy to have them.
Brent Leary: I really love the way you're talking about not using this stuff to get rid of employees, but to let the AI actually help the employees. That really hit me right here because I believe it when anybody from Zoho says that. And believe me, I speak to a lot of different companies and I do not get that feeling when it comes to how AI is being positioned.
Why is it so important for you guys to make sure that is one of those things you want to have happen, especially at Zoho, but maybe even help your customers feel the same way and do the same kind of things.
Taylor Backman: You're a small business owner, you are trying to build out a new marketing program. You're using marketing tools that you've never used before, you're stuck, you've sunk a lot of time into this, you're frustrated, you really need some help, right? Or you're a professional working in a large marketing department and your boss is breathing down your neck because we need to get this thing out to hit this quarterly project, to make sure we hit our results that get reported up the ladder, you really need to do this, right?
Do we really just want it to be an AI LLM that we reach out to? Does it really understand the problem that we're that we're feeling emotionally, the pain that we're in?
First and foremost, good support is just the ability to say, hey, I understand this sucks and let me help you. And that's something that even if you have a really, really smart LLM or really smart AI, it can't do that. And that's the thing I think that we 100% want to invest in and we think is super important.
Engineers like to try to model and automate the world. You can't remove that fundamental human connection, and that's what we want. Our goal at Zoho is building software to power other people's works, right? Your life's work powered by our life's work. It's on our website. It'd be very strange if all of a sudden we don't want to talk to you. We still want to be able to help you. We still want to answer your call, and we still want to thank you for being our customer.
Brent Leary: I just needed to pull up and hear you expand a little on that. Uh, just even if it's just for me, I mean, I don't think it's just for me, but it it just felt really good to hear a vendor say that.
Key Zoho One Updates: Experience, Integration, and Intelligence (Summary by Gemini)
Today's announcements are geared towards allowing businesses to "impose their processes on software" rather than being constrained by rigid application models to enhance user experience and workflow; going from an application-cetric to platform-centric mode of operation.
The update is built upon three pillars: Experience, Integration, and Intelligence.
Experience
*New Solution: Spaces:The new experience unifies all tools into a single, seamless, and context-rich interface based on the concept of "spaces," much like rooms in a house, incuding:
Personal Space: For individual productivity (email, chat, calendar).
Org Space: For internal communication (intranet, feeds, documents).
Functional Spaces:For teams like Sales, Marketing, and Support, where relevant tools are packaged together.
New Solution: Boards:A concept evolving from dashboards, that allows users to easily switch contexts and view data from different applications (including third-party apps) on multiple home screens.
New Tool: Vani:** A collaborative, whiteboard/canvas tool being brought into Zoho One, allowing teams to organize meetings, brainstorming, and other activities. It can be deployed across various team spaces.
Integration
The focus in this area is on enhancing connections between Zoho One's 50+ applications, and simplifying integration with third-party tools - third partyt to Zoho One apps and thrid-party to third-part apps. They are categorized into:
Outcome-Based Integrations: Automated workflows for simple, yet complicated, tasks, including:
* User Offboarding: A "simple" outcome like deleting a user across all applications is handled seamlessly, preventing gaps in reporting hierarchies and license management.
* Foundational Integrations (Unified Portal): A unified portal has been created to combine the portal features of various apps (CRM, Help Desk, Project Management) into one, allowing a customer's customer/user to access everything with a single set of credentials.
* Third-party and custom applications can be deployed through this unified portal as well.
* Single Sign-On (SSO):Zoho One handles user authentication for third-party services like Google and Salesforce, allowing users to have a seamless experience across all tools.
* Domain Management: Simplifies domain verification and configuration (e.g., one-click authentication with GoDaddy) and pushes a single authentication across all Zoho email and marketing services.
Intelligence (AI and Data Security)
Ask Zia: An AI assistant, ready in the next couple of months, accessible from the product's bottom-right corner.
Functionality: Users can ask questions for simple reporting (e.g., "show me all new leads") or complex cross-functional reporting (e.g., "show me tickets by my top 10 accounts").
*Security:Ask Zia respects the complex permission structures handled by Zoho's directory, ensuring different users (like a standard user vs. a CEO) receive responses appropriate to their access rights.
*AI and Human Support: Zoho believes AI is not a replacement for human support experiences. While AI can quickly answer questions, they will continue to invest heavily in their support staff because "they can do things that computers can't do". This includes providing the critical human ability to say, "I understand this sucks and let me help you".
Beneficiaries and Next Steps
* **Who Benefits:** Taylor asserts that the updates will benefit businesses of all sizes, from small businesses expecting consumer-level slickness in their tools to enterprises needing deep features like key management and comprehensive directory services.
* **Availability:** More information can be found at Zoho.com/one.
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