IT Minister adopts Zoho’s office suite to back homegrown tech
Calls on citizens to embrace Indian digital products
Zoho earlier chosen to run government email services
Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw on Monday announced that he is switching to using Zoho’s office suit software to promote homegrown products and services. In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Vaishnaw wrote, “I am moving to Zoho — our own Swadeshi platform for documents, spreadsheets & presentations”.
“I urge all to join PM Shri @narendramodi Ji’s call for Swadeshi by adopting indigenous products & services,” he said. His statement come alongside the government’s renewed emphasis on promoting ‘swadeshi’ and driving self-reliance.
Sridhar Vembu-led Zoho has previously worked closely with Vaishnaw’s ministry. In September 2023, some media reports revealed that the Ministry of Electronics and IT had selected Zoho to manage email services along with several other internet-based office tools.
This was the first instance when the government outsourced its internal email operations to a private company, which have traditionally been maintained by the National Informatics Services.
Zoho’s Ulaa browser emerged as the winner of MeitY’s Indian Web Browser Development Challenge, outshining 433 competing teams. A month later, it was named the Official SaaS Partner for the MeitY Startup Hub Deeptech Arena at Startup Mahakumbh 2025.
In July, Zoho announced its proprietary large language (LLM) model designed for enterprises using its suite of products, the latest move reflecting bold ambitions of Indian firms to build and innovate on their own AI stacks in the global tech race.
It has also rolled out automatic speech recognition models for speech-to-text conversion in English and Hindi. The Chennai-headquartered company plans to further expand the available languages, beginning with other Indian and European languages.
"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," Vembu had said.
Zia LLM has been deployed across Zoho's data centres in the US, India, and Europe. The company tested the model for internal use cases across Zoho's broad app portfolio, and will be available for customer use in coming months.
To enable immediate adoption of agentic technology, Zoho has developed a roster of AI agents contextually infused right into its products.
These agents can be used across various business activities, handling relevant actions based on the role of the user.
These include customer service agent for Zoho Desk that can process incoming customer requests, understand the context, and either answer directly or triage them to a human representative, acting as an efficient first line of assistance.
