Top email hosting service Zoho has announced plans to create its own custom large language models (LLMs) using Nvidia’s AI computing platform. The enterprise-focused LLMs will leverage Nvidia’s NeMo tools and advanced GPUs to enhance Zoho’s services across the board with AI. Zoho has already invested $10 million in AI and plans to double that number in the coming year.
That investment and the Nvidia partnership will enable Zoho to expand and improve its AI capabilities for users of the ManageEngine and Zoho.com platforms, a list of more than 700,000 customers. Developing the LLMs to drive business-specific needs will help them differentiate from standard consumer-grade AI tools and drive faster and better decisions by those businesses.
Zoho’s AI plans include not only LLMs, but also multi-modal models that can handle visual and voice-enabled AI tools for businesses. Zoho is also testing the Nvidia TensorRT-LLM to further upgrade the LLM implementation, increasing throughput by 60% and reducing latency by 35%. Compared to open source frameworks that the company tried before, it has already seen.
Zoho Nvidia
By partnering with Nvidia, Zoho has a better setup for more diverse AI workloads. Nvidia’s technology makes features like speech-to-text and the necessary high-performance infrastructure much more feasible. More importantly, these AI capabilities will be added to Zoho’s entire product range of over 100 tools. They are ready to assist with sales, marketing, customer support, accounting, and other business needs.
And, unlike the larger general-purpose models, Zoho can focus its efforts on smaller language models with more limited enterprise purposes that can address specific business data needs. That makes Zoho’s AI more accessible to client companies, regardless of the size of their data sets. So companies can use AI more efficiently with more precise goals and gain insights tailored to the type of information they actually want to help inform decision-making.
“Many LLMs on the market today are designed for consumer use and provide limited value for businesses. At Zoho, our mission is to develop LLMs specifically tailored to a wide range of business use cases,” said Zoho Director of AI Ramprakash Ramamoorthy. “Owning our entire tech stack, with products spanning several business functions, allows us to integrate the essential element that makes AI truly effective: context.”