Episode Transcript
[00:00:22] Speaker A: Hi, I'm Erwin Lazar, president and principal analyst at Metrogy and I'm excited to be here live From Zoho Day 26 with Pravel Singh and we'll talk a little bit about some of what we've learned through the last day and a half of sessions and some of the initiatives that are underway here at Zoho and Pravel. I'd love to start with just a quick introduction of yourself and then we'll dive into some of the topics.
[00:00:44] Speaker B: Sure. My name is Praval. Me and my team are responsible for all things brand marketing at Zoho. I've been around for about 14 odd years at Zoho here and very fortunate to sort of see the company come this far. Happy to share anything and everything that I can with you today.
[00:01:00] Speaker A: Excellent. So I'll start with, on the flight down here, I flew on United and there was the Zoho ad up on the entertainment screen. So were you responsible for that?
[00:01:10] Speaker B: Yeah. So in fact, we've been for the longest time we were not heavy on advertising as such, especially when it comes to Zoho brand, but the last five years or so, we've taken conscious steps across the world in key markets to talk about who we are, what we do, why we are relevant and how we are different.
And that includes airports, airlines, billboards, all of that. So that's part of that.
[00:01:36] Speaker A: Excellent. So a lot of the discussion's obviously been around AI and being able to make Zoho that system of record that can leverage the intelligence that you have through CRM, through other myriad of Zoho apps that are out there and provide that common fabric for your customers, how is that changing the story that you tell as you think about how you might have marketed to the benefits of Zoho, say five years ago, pre AI to where you are now. Is it changing the people you're talking to as well as the messaging?
[00:02:09] Speaker B: No. I think one thing, the things that I've changed over the last five, seven, ten years and the things that have not.
One thing we have been consistent at and would love to keep it that way is we believe in offering customers the best value for their money when it comes to business software. Now that's a fundamental principle on which we've thrived all these years, in fact, three decades now, as we celebrate 30 years of Zoho.
So customers choose us for a few things. Value is one of them. Privacy is another important factor why customers prefer us. And in the age of AI, what we're seeing happen and how we are playing to that is in all these years we have invested in building the breadth and depth of our product portfolio.
Most of the products have matured all these years with a lot of feedback from customers from analysts like yourselves and a lot of other people.
Now our intention now is to become a platform of choice for customers, for businesses of all sizes. And with that platform, what I mean is the platform that powers all our applications is something that we are trying to enable and offer to people outside as well.
So with app os, which we announced at this event, our goal is to bring out that platform, make it available for partners to come and build on top of it. While Zoho's application run on certain platform, everything from infrastructure to common services, et cetera, you want to give it out to people to build on top of it. Because we see the future of business software is going to get highly nuanced.
And that happens the best in vertical stories.
Looking at industry verticals, we've gained some expertise in the last several years working with automobile sector, BFSI sector, retail, manufacturing and so on and so forth.
Our idea is to get that platform to enable people, partners essentially to build software on top of it. And then what the platform ensures is as a foundation layer, it brings in all the essentials. It could be not just the capabilities off the shelf, but also guardrails, including areas like regulated industries for that matter, or governance. How do you make it as a package? Offer it to people to build on top of it using low code, no code and pro code tools and of course AI from a codegen angle. So that's the way we are looking at it. We're talking to the same people, the same customers. But being more valuable, more efficient is what is I think important. And that's the path that we're on.
[00:04:46] Speaker A: And we've seen this general trend from a selling features to selling solutions and benefits. And I'm curious to dive a little bit more deeply as you're thinking about. We heard from a number of your customers today and to be frank, a lot of them went through that traditional software evaluation approach. But now you're looking at maybe targeting developers and people who want to take you mentioned app OS and love to get a little bit more into that, but taking that development capabilities and building customized capabilities, how does that change messaging go to market for Zoho?
[00:05:19] Speaker B: So there'll always be off the shelf product and certain products I would say is think of it as a recipe. You need ingredients, there's some things which are available off the shelf will always be, let's say an E Signature tool or a survey tool.
You can sprinkle that into any function. A survey can be used by HR folks, but also marketing folks and other people. E Signature can be part of a finance process, but can also be part of a legal or something else for that matter. These are ingredients of a recipe that can be sprinkled in any way. But what the platform or the app OS does is to build that customized offering for any vertical. Take BFSI sector for that matter, building a loan origination system or in the automobile world, building a dms.
These are things that typically won't be available off the shelf, but the platform enables it to be bundled, packaged and made available to. And again then there is a regional nuance to it.
A payroll system in India is very different from payroll system elsewhere for that matter.
So I think what is happening is we've been for the longest time a software vendor which had multiple products across functions, more than 55 of them.
Way we are progressing from here on is becoming the platform of choice, as I said. So you have those applications ready to use off the shelf, you can extend them, you can integrate them with something else, you can make it interoperable with your existing on prem on cloud systems. All that already exists.
The next phase is how do you shorten the time to value that period because customers want value and they want it as early as today.
How do you bring that implementation cycle from months and years to weeks and months? That is where I think the value is. And all our messaging positioning engagements like these are oriented towards that. How are we enabling our customers to get value and in a shorter period of time?
[00:07:21] Speaker A: And we've seen. So I heard from a number of the presenters talking about how we're moving from that.
Let's talk about what AI can do to. Let's actually have AI do it in 2026. And people are looking for real world results. And we see that in our research, companies are moving beyond the kicking of the tires into actual deployments. We've certainly seen a number of stories and studies that have said companies are struggling to achieve that. So it sounds like by leveraging the Zoho platform as that system of record, companies maybe have a stronger opportunity, stronger likelihood of success because they have that common framework to build around.
[00:07:59] Speaker B: No, absolutely. And we talk about it often that AI for consumers is very different from AI at work, AI for business, because it's not as simple as giving LLM a prompt to find the best places to eat in Austin. It's Very different from when you run a query within the system. And oftentimes it's not even a prompt, it's contextual intelligence is what I would say, not just artificial intelligence. And that context comes from the foundation, which is the platform.
And things that come into play in this setup is something as important as the permission layer, which is achieved by Directory.
So directory enables you or the system rather to figure out who has access to what and contextually bring information. For example, if in an organization I report into you, there are certain things I shouldn't have access to, AI or not, that is what directory enables. So in a business context all these things are important. Hence the foundation is important, the platform is important, the guardinals are important.
AI then just gets interesting because it can work on top of it without this under the hood system AI. It's not like a magic box.
And when, of course, when we saw in the last two, two and a half years when AI came up, we thought everything becomes an LLN problem. But no, you have to have the foundation. And at Zoho we believe in that and that's the way forward.
[00:09:33] Speaker A: And I've heard it echoed by a number of speakers that privacy security are really key differentiators. We see that in our research. We published back in late November a study of about 310 companies and we asked what are some of the barriers that you're facing as you think about implementing AI and security? Data leakage, data privacy, customer data privacy, ensuring that if there's a capture of say a meeting transcript, that that was a sensitive meeting, that it's not now sitting in the LLM. We've seen leakage issues, so it makes sense for you to be.
[00:10:02] Speaker B: Absolutely. And we are pretty clear that we are working on AI for business. We're not building a consumer AI technology. You know, we want to be away from that and we want to be relevant for businesses and bring out use cases, areas in which AI can help businesses.
And we are seeing early signs of improving productivity, but there's more to be done. There's more to be done is what we believe in terms of beyond just productivity and efficiency. How can AI and things like agents enable that today? Right. A lot of it, that parts of it which you would want to be automated. Of course there are certain areas where we would want human intervention, but parts of it that can be automated, parts of IT that can do the routine task is already happening. We're seeing it at Zoho, we're seeing it with our customers.
That's the direction I would say, yeah.
[00:10:53] Speaker A: How do you see the evolution of partners? We've heard from a number of partners here that are taking the capabilities you're delivering, customizing those for specifications, verticals, specific regions, curious as to what kind of messaging you're sharing with them.
[00:11:07] Speaker B: Yeah. See, we've had an extensive partner network over the years. Most of them were either resellers or implementation partners and they would either sell a Zoho product or a bunch of products together, some integration with other tools. That's the usual drill. What happens with app OS going forward is platforms, sorry, partners can build on the platform, bring in expertise that they have about a domain, industry, a region, and then because a lot of capabilities are off, the box, abstraction layer goes up. So the, again, the time to value, the time to implement is much shorter. So partners are able to build and package things to faster. And then they know the market, they know the customer, so, you know, they can, they can, they can sell that. And together our goal is to expand the partner network, have more people come and build on it, and then go to market together in certain regions.
And again, that's how it's been. But with AI and with the whole platform approach, I would say the cycle becomes shorter. Yeah, yeah.
[00:12:17] Speaker A: How are you seeing AI impact marketing? How do you see that it'll change?
[00:12:21] Speaker B: Interesting. So it started with. Yeah, interesting. It started with AI getting into content space from something as trivial as summarization to running some concepts and ideas to see some early mood boards, let's say put that way. But now it's moving in a direction where you can create videos. You can.
If I have an idea and I want to create a landing page or a prototype for that matter. Right. Instead of having to work very closely with a designer for weeks, the first prototype can come out pretty much the same day. So again, shorter time to value. I would say it's happening in the marketing world as well. The other part of AI in marketing is analytics and insights. You know, how do you work across a campaign through for a segment of audience?
A lot of AI is now getting into giving you that intelligence, both using historical data, your current campaign data. And I'm seeing some interesting stories come out, both from customers, some at Zoho and some from friends in the industry.
So interesting times ahead.
[00:13:33] Speaker A: Exciting times. Yeah. So what excites you the most as you think about what you've heard here this week and now being able to take that to a broader audience? What, what gets you excited from evangelism, product marketing standpoint for the next year
[00:13:48] Speaker B: I think what we announced today is something we've been at it for a while, so there was a lot of weight in bringing out to people here today.
And from here on before we announce it for general availability, which is later this year, we're looking and we're already testing some of this out with some customers and partners. So what I'm excited about is next time when we go out with this, we have some customers come on stage and talk about how they're building on app os.
Some partners come and bring in some interesting stories and then everything that we are talking about gets validated from time to value, easy to create applications and the power of the platform. So I think that's going to be interesting. We're looking at announcing it for general availability later this year and that's first part. The other part is to bring in more partners on the platform to do more and that is where the next phase of growth is, to be honest. And this is across SMB market and large enterprises both. Yeah, we're working with some of the largest SIS as well and that's what we're looking for this year to see how adoption happens.
[00:14:57] Speaker A: Excellent. Where can people find you if they want to follow up, ask you any questions?
[00:15:02] Speaker B: I'm pretty active on X as Praval, my first name and on LinkedIn as well as Praval Singh.
[00:15:08] Speaker A: Excellent. Well, thank you so much for watching and we look forward to hearing a lot more out of Zoho over the next year and especially around app os.
