Zoho has announced the addition of ten new services and features to Zoho Creator, its low-code platform. This flurry of updates is not isolated, as the firm is committing to delivering a constant stream of AI updates in the coming months. The firm also hosted a briefing at which it talked through its latest updates and the ethos behind its AI development roadmap.
Zoho Creator is the company’s low-code application development platform. Bharath Kumar, Head of Marketing & Customer Experience, Zoho Developer Suite, explained the question behind the Zoho mission for the product. He said, “How can we empower everyone to easily build powerful applications?”
Sridhar Iyengar, Managing Director, Zoho Europe, commented, “Since Creator’s introduction in 2006, the focus has been on simplifying and speeding up the app development process without sacrificing functionality.
“This enabled our users to launch millions of apps successfully. AI allows us to take it to another level, shortening the time from an idea to an app. Today’s announcement raises the baseline on the speed of quality app creation with deep capabilities, without adding costs.”
At the heart of the new features is the Zoho Cocreator. This application enables users to create intelligent applications quicker and easier. The feature is powered by Zia, which enables it to let users create complex applications using a natural language interface, either in written form or even voice. The new features are included free within the existing Creator subscription.
CoCreator Features
Zoho details the new features as follows:
Idea-to-App Generation
Leverage capabilities of ZohoAI or OpenAI to develop full-fledged applications, including contextual integrations, automations, permission sets and insightful dashboards. CoCreator will create the relevant use cases, forms, reports, interactive dashboards, and field relationships to further support the application.
By using text or voice prompts, process flow diagrams, or systems documentation like software requirement specifications (SRS), CoCreator will provide domain-specific suggestions, ideas for relevant fields, and modules tailored to a customer’s business. The tool will also create the mobile version of the app, enabling clients to distribute the app quickly to users.
Component generation using AI
Contextual component development enhances existing applications with prompt-based form generation. In addition, Zia proactively recommends contextual fields within an existing form, a feature missing in most similar low-code app development tools.
Code generation and optimisation
With Zia’s prompter, various developer personas can use prompts to automatically generate contextual code blocks, tailored to application requirements and structure. This feature can also be used to optimise and annotate existing code blocks for ideal performance.
Data cleansing and modelling
Quickly transform unstructured data from various file types and databases into customised apps, aided by advanced AI-based data prep capabilities that remove inconsistencies and bring logical structure to detail. The file types supported include CSV, TSV, XLS, XLSV, and TXT. Users can also ingest data from cloud platforms, including Zoho WorkDrive, Google Drive, Box, OneDrive, and Dropbox.
AI Skills
Enables businesses to build apps with specialised skills that can interpret natural language instructions, analyse the business context, and coordinate a chain of actions (powered by Deluge and specialised AI models) to intelligently automate everyday processes. This feature is currently available in Early Access only, set to launch in General Availability in June 2025.
Bring Your Own Model
Users can deploy a custom AI model with context-specific data to meet specific requirements, with support for custom models for OCR, prediction, and object detection. Users can currently choose between the Zoho LLM and OpenAI to leverage customer models.
Zoho is leveraging AI to empower developers to create code faster and with higher quality. This is not just about creating a tool for developers, though.
Bharat explained, “This is predominantly targeted at developers, the code optimisation, etc. But from idea to prototype aspect is meant for citizen developers, someone who has an idea but doesn’t know where to start. This platform helps them start. The core of functionalities that you see today are meant for citizen developers.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
Zoho continues to build AI capabilities into its platform. It has an advantage over many in that it controls and has developed all aspects of its AI platform. Zoho builds its AI capabilities with the context in mind, which means that the AI capabilities are fit for purpose, built-in context and do not carry a huge cost, enabling Zoho to embed AI capabilities without increasing the cost.
In the coming months, Zoho will also make Agentic AI automation; expect Zoho to roll out this and other new capabilities. The new capabilities will also help drive its attraction to larger firms while retaining its SME footprint. The impressive aspect of Zoho is that it keeps pricing both low and simple. Organisations of all sizes can take advantage of the full functionality it offers.
