Zoho has announced a major update to Zoho Analytics, its business intelligence and analytics platform, introducing Agentic Analytics capabilities that connect business data, organisational context, insights and action.
The enhanced platform provides a shared intelligence layer that enables AI agents to interpret business information, deliver context-aware insights and support workflows across analytics, applications and business operations.
For businesses operating in increasingly data-driven environments, the ability to turn information into meaningful insights is essential to making informed decisions and responding to changing business needs. With the latest enhancements, Zoho Analytics moves beyond traditional reporting and data analysis to help organisations understand their data in context and use AI to support more informed, practical business decisions.
The platform’s new capabilities are built around semantic and ontology layers that help AI agents understand an organisation’s terminology, metrics, structure and priorities. By establishing a common understanding of how a business operates, Zoho Analytics enables AI-generated insights and recommendations to be more relevant to the organisation’s specific needs, while providing governance and oversight throughout the process.
“We are at the beginning of the next leap forward in data analytics, where a strong data foundation is the starting point for all agentic activity in business operations,” says Andrew Bourne, regional head of Zoho South Africa “Agents, however, cannot function only with data, but require a robust intelligence layer. Today’s updates to Zoho Analytics provide that and more: one open and extensible trusted intelligence layer that gives every AI tool in your business the context, metrics, and governance to deliver answers users can rely on.”
At the centre of the enhanced platform is Ask Zia, Zoho’s conversational business intelligence super-agent, which now uses a multi-agent architecture to coordinate specialised agents across data analysis, , visualisation, data preparation, modeling, coding and actions. This allows users to move from asking questions about their data to developing analyses and building workflows through a single interface, without losing the context of the original request.
Ask Zia works with the organisation’s semantic and ontology layers, conversation history and agent memory to maintain continuity as tasks evolve. Businesses can also create custom agents grounded in their own data, business models and knowledge bases, with connectivity to external tools and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers.
The platform’s semantic layer acts as a business glossary for AI, standardising definitions, terminology, synonyms, instructions and metrics. Its ontology layer provides a structured representation of business entities and the relationships between them, helping AI agents understand how different parts of an organisation connect. These capabilities are built into Zoho Analytics, allowing businesses to establish and manage their models without requiring a separate data platform or cloud data warehouse.
Zoho Analytics is expanding its integration capabilities with more than 30 additional data connectors, building on the more than 500 already available. The new connectors include support for Zoho ERP, Zoho Spend, Zoho FSM, Zoho Shifts and Zoho Voice, alongside third-party platforms such as SAP, PayPal, Adobe Commerce, Twilio, Notion, Intercom, Supabase, Amazon DocumentDB and AlloyDB.
Intelligence generated through Zoho Analytics can also be used beyond the platform itself. Developers and AI agents can build solutions using the Zoho Analytics MCP server, which supports data analysis, preparation and visualisation. Additional capabilities include a command-line interface and the ability to work with Zoho Analytics from within Claude through a Claude plug-in.
Organisations can also embed AI agents into their own applications, portals and products through white-label capabilities, while maintaining permissions and governance controls. This enables businesses to extend analytics and AI-driven functionality into the digital environments they already use.
As businesses explore the use of AI across their operations, maintaining oversight of data access, AI usage and automated processes remains important. Zoho Analytics provides administrators with tools to manage how agents operate and how business information is accessed and used.
The platform’s data catalog brings together data, metrics, analytics and models, supporting data lineage, impact analysis, search and the management of data and access policies. AI
observability capabilities allow administrators to see which agents have run, who has used them, what information they have accessed and how they have responded to queries. Administrators can also monitor AI usage and costs across teams and manage Ask Zia’s behaviour through administrative settings.
In addition, sandbox and deployment management capabilities enable teams to develop and test analytics assets and agents in a controlled environment before publishing them to production. Previous versions can be restored when required, providing further control over the development and deployment process.