Zoho Infuses ChatGPT Into Its Applications

Chennai-headquartered Zoho Corporation on Thursday said it has integrated OpenAI’s ChatGPT into its Zia artificial intelligence (AI) engine.

The SaaS player intends to facilitate Zia's integration with third-party intelligence, as it has done with ChatGPT, bringing generative AI into the company's broad portfolio of business solutions.

The Sridhar Vembu-led company plans to take generative AI technology in-house in the near future to cater to the demands of its 90 million global users. Zoho believes this integration will model improve customer experience, add value and protect user privacy.

“The fusion of ChatGPT's generative AI with our homegrown AI features will provide users with a more intuitive, efficient, and secure experience, reflecting Zoho's deep R&D-first culture,” said Ramprakash Ramamoorthy, Director - AI Research, Zoho Corporation.

Interestingly, Vembu recently spoke on the issue of “truth” representation with ChatGPT outcomes. But now its integrations and extensions are being introduced to Zoho applications. BW Businessworld queried Ramamoorthy on this.  

“AI technology is trained on data and ChatGPT is no different. The answers that ChatGPT produces are based on information available to it, which may or may not be 'true', and that is what Sridhar Vembu referred to. However, ChatGPT, when integrated with a business app and trained on data made available to it about a business, can help improve productivity,” Ramamoorthy replied.

He added that businesses pay OpenAI and get a key which is entered into their Zoho account. “This way, the context is not mixed with other Zoho users, which keeps our user data intact from a privacy perspective. OpenAI also has a legally standing privacy policy that states that data from paid users will not be used to train their models,” he explained.

Zoho's new generative AI integrations, powered by ChatGPT, complement the broad portfolio of AI technology it already supports. This new technology has been reportedly contextually integrated into Zoho's applications and can be leveraged right away.

“We are confident that our investments in AI will significantly contribute to an increase in deal wins for our company in the future,” Ramamoorthy told BW Businessworld.