Hitting stride with AppOS, AI and low-code automation at ZohoDay 2026

Joining colleagues of all specialties at my fifth ZohoDay analyst event over the years, I knew what to expect: Direct interaction with customers and executives, evidence of continued growth and innovation, and another strategy to unify everything.

I wasn’t wrong, but as Zoho Corp. celebrated its 30th anniversary as a bootstrapped, privately held company that has surpassed a million customers of all sizes, there was another energy in the air. Zoho isn’t punching above its weight anymore; it is holding its ground against the titans of software-as-a-service – while also acting as a bulwark to prevent the demise of SaaS against a host of autonomous artificial intelligence agents.

In last year’s ZohoDay event, Zoho presented an agentic AI builder and cross-application natural language interfaces through its Zia AI model. Since we already live in a world where AI vendors and pundits are saying you can just ask Cursor or Claude Code to make your next app for you, it is time to take AI integration issues head-on.

AppOS as a reliability layer against agentic fragmentation

The company’s new AppOS approach is in one sense an extension of its earlier message of building an “operating system for business” that culminated in the Zoho One platform. It unified the 50-plus business apps and thousands of integration kits it already supports. 

“Most of the customers I meet say they already have more than 200 applications, and they have a hard time changing functionality fast enough to meet business demands, so they end up only adding to the complexity,” said Chief Executive Mani Vembu (pictured). 

When MCP servers and coding agents such as Replit and Lovable are added to the mix, they naturally create fragmentation. “If we just add agents on top of this architecture, the foundations of our apps develop cracks and become very weak,” Vembu added. “We need a stronger reliability layer to support differentiation.”

With ungoverned generative AI usage and coding agents proliferating within many companies, Zoho’s AppOS strategy seeks to provide a unified semantic integration, development and data platform. The aim is to allow humans and agents to work side by side to build custom apps and integrate across services and AI models, while respecting data sovereignty and privacy concerns.

Will AI agents kill SaaS?

Some market experts predict an extinction-level event for SaaS solutions from AI agents, when we are really just looking at another massive culling of the herd like the dot-com bomb of 2000, or the consolidation that followed the cloud computing craze.

According to the keynote, there are too many business-to-business apps in play handling specific types of work. Most of the 264 SaaS apps mentioned in a recent survey lumped into the shadow IT category, with only 26% of those purchases managed by information technology departments. But it’s not like AI is going to magically replace these apps – Deloitte predicted that 40% of agentic AI projects will fail by 2027.

Only the strongest solutions, or the ones that add business value, will survive. The next generation of AI-infused apps will still need to integrate with the systems of record and collaboration enterprises already have in place.

“AI has moved from experimentation to operationalization within a year, so we’re starting to see best-of-breed consolidation,” said Vijay Sundaram, Zoho’s chief strategy officer. “Investors, stockholders and business stakeholders need to tie AI projects to outcomes through integration. Your systems of record, APIs and all of the layers of your technology have become strategic assets, and now there is some magnificence in what was mundane.”

An architecture-first approach to AI integration

As it turns out, core systems such as customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning, along with low-code app builder tools such as Zoho Creator and Zoho Flow for data integration, can all become essential tools for AI agents to use, under the strategic direction of business stakeholders. AI agents are not going to replace developers. They will allow them to remove much of the toil of coding while moving closer to the customer contact surface.

“What we’re doing with our own engineers is less coding, more domain expertise and more entrepreneurial, creative thinking about what features would benefit customers and the business,” said Mo Umerji, head of enterprise architecture at Newcross Healthcare Solutions. “With off-the-shelf creators, you don’t have the ability for one custom application to talk to another. Can we really trust the tools to keep the data where we need it? Especially for healthcare, you can’t have an agent or an LLM training other people on your data. With Zia AI and Zoho, our data stays in a closed ecosystem.”

Another major concern for the future of AI is the explosion of highly energy-consumptive data center capacity to support today’s leading large language models and gen AI prompt engines. Zoho was one of the first companies to introduce SLMs – small language models that are specialized on domain knowledge.

“We’re introducing system constraints into our AI logic, so our customers can rightsize models within the context of their work for better cost and sustainability,” said Ramprakash Ramamoorthy, Zoho Labs’ director of AI research.

Zoho has continued building data center capacity, evolving its own Postgres-style distributed data lake and global AI data centers that can “flex” to run inferences (whether using Zia or other leading models) on commodity graphics processing units for low-latency performance and costs. It also showed off a maxed-out in-house server prototype that might be of future interest for highly regulated environments.

Building through domain-specific partner expertise

If I were the kind of analyst who cared about compound annual growth rate and revenue predictions, Zoho’s tight-lipped approach to financial disclosure would bother me. But one aspect worth paying attention to is the rapid (around threefold over five years) growth of channel revenue through global system integrator and local managed service provider partners across regions such as Asia, Africa and Latin America, with only one-third of revenue from North American customers.

Zoho offers partners a Vertical Studio for building vertical-specific solutions, such as legal firm operations, maritime management — or an AutoDMS dealer management system that automates workflows across car marketplaces, publishes inventory, keeps track of customer touchpoints, and handles loan origination.

One partner demonstrated how it delivers and maintains a bespoke white-labeled platform to support members of an international janitorial franchising organization.  

“Zoho allows us to not only change our system, but to scale to our customer’s specifications within Vertical Studio,” said Catherine Carignan-Turcotte, chief business development officer at NSI Solution. “We can configure their apps with reduced functionality for just what franchises need to use, and push updates with fast deployment.”

Zoho’s uncompromising privacy-first positioning is starting to pay off internationally. With instances of state-level hackers and supply chain interference abounding, companies and countries are prioritizing data sovereignty going forward. “If somebody else can grab my data, or pull the plug on my messaging, or hijack my payment system, am I really sovereign?” said Zoho’s Sundaram.

Another interesting part of the show was the tightened integration of their ManageEngine subsidiary, a comprehensive ITOM/ITSM application suite that when combined with Zoho’s flagship platform, allows the company and its business partners to repackage their support for larger enterprise customers in new ways, including white-labeling operations and security for MSPs.

The Intellyx take

Zoho, a company that until recently never advertised at all, now has ads appearing on buses, trains and billboards around the world. It’s still popular among small businesses and bringing practical AI to developing economies, yes, but it is also gaining traction with larger enterprises – including a few companies that were startups on Zoho a decade ago.

Sure, its AppOS may be just another layer of abstraction, another way to build business context for apps and AI agents atop a complex array of systems and data sources. The real story here, though, is about using that context to enable humans with domain expertise to deliver value.

“Zoho is our force multiplier,” said Jeff Anderson, vice president of IT at INTEGRIS Credit Union. “With 80% of our customers never coming into the branch, we are trying to understand our customers where they are. It’s not best-of-breed that we’re looking for anymore, it’s applications that can talk to each other and integrate new processes that can add customer value.”

Jason English is director and principal analyst at Intellyx. He wrote this article for SiliconANGLE. ©2026, Intellyx B.V. Intellyx is solely responsible for the content of this article, and no AI was used to generate this copy. At the time of writing, Zoho is an Intellyx subscriber, and it covered costs for the analyst to attend, a common industry practice.

Photo: Jason English