AUTOMATED ANSWERS: Ramprakash Ramamoorthy, Director of AI Research, Zoho
As an intern at software major Zoho in 2011, Ramprakash Ramamoorthy had worked with teams that were still figuring out whether machine learning could be integrated into the firm’s suite of products. Sentiment analysis, anomaly detection, recommendation engines — these were his first few brushes with the working of algorithms, before he surfed the Alexa and Siri waves in 2018, and the Chat GPT wave of 2022.
Recently, Zoho launched three large learning models and a speech recognition model (in English and Hindi, with 15 more regional languages to follow). On the sidelines of the launch of Zoho’s platform for building ‘agents’ — autonomous software systems — Ramamoorthy, now Director of AI Research, told businessline that the focus remains firmly on offering value to customers and securing their privacy.
Edited excerpts from the chat:
As AI director, what is your mandate?
We have a hub-and-spoke model for AI development. I am a part of a group called Zoho Labs, where we take care of the foundational technology; then there are 55-plus product teams, which build on top of the foundation we provide.
What does Zoho Labs do?
We’re about 200 people in the team, distributed across Nagpur, Tenkasi, Chennai and other locations. We also have a five-member team in Mexico for our Spanish initiatives.
We have teams that work on databases. Then there’s a hardware acceleration team. Last year, we announced our partnership with Nvidia… their work goes towards the technical foundation. We have a hardware team that works with AMD, Intel and others. We think AI hardware is super-important to ride the AI/ML wave.
Where does Zoho stand in the current agentic AI wave?
We have 25-plus pre-built agents, some India-specific agents for Aadhaar verification and so on. In agent studio, you can prompt and build your own agents. Our MCP [model context protocol] server connects models like GPT or Claude to Zoho’s APIs, data models, and actions.
How will AI change enterprise software?
A lot of it will become prompt-driven, with users not needing to learn to use it. Enterprises are overwhelmed… none have got an ROI from their existing AI stack. So, the first thing is to get your digital maturity right.
Do all firms need agentic AI?
Wherever there’s repetitive workflow, agents can add value. With our footed agents we saw 10-30 per cent productivity, but they cannot replace my support team. People talk about 10X, but we haven’t seen that. Companies must first find out what can be automated and remove the data silos for smooth flow of data. Yes, agents will be important, but they cannot replace humans… a strong digital foundation should be at the core of agentic AI usage.
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Published on July 28, 2025
