Chennai: Chennai-based technology company Zoho on Tuesday announced a major upgrade to its business intelligence platform, Zoho Analytics, introducing new artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities that enable businesses to analyse data, generate insights and automate workflows through intelligent agents.

The upgraded platform combines business data, organisational context and AI-driven automation to help companies make informed decisions and execute tasks with greater accuracy.

Clarence Rozario, Director of Product Management, Zoho BI and Analytics Platform, said the business intelligence industry was moving from traditional human-driven analysis towards intelligent orchestration.

He said AI agents needed to understand an organisation's specific metrics, hierarchies, business terminology and operational boundaries before they could be trusted with business decisions.

The latest version introduces ontology and semantic layers that help AI systems understand business operations. While the ontology layer maps an organisation's structure, the semantic layer defines key business terms and metrics, enabling more accurate analysis.

A key feature is Ask Zia, Zoho's conversational business intelligence platform, which uses six specialised AI agents to handle data analysis, modelling, visualisation, data preparation, coding and SQL generation. Businesses can also create customised agents that connect with internal and external systems through the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

The agents can go beyond analysing information to trigger automated workflows, with users able to design processes through a new workflow builder.

Zoho said the platform also supports more than 530 data connectors, including new integrations with Zoho's business applications and third-party services such as SAP, PayPal, Adobe Commerce, Twilio and Notion.

The company has introduced support for Apache Ossa, an open-source standard that allows businesses to share their metrics and business definitions across different business intelligence platforms and AI agents.

The upgraded platform also provides developers with a headless business intelligence model, an MCP server and a command-line interface. Users can access Zoho Analytics through a Claude plug-in, while businesses can embed AI agents into their own applications and portals.

To strengthen data security and oversight, the platform includes AI monitoring, usage and cost tracking, access controls and data lineage features. Administrators can monitor agent activity, track data access and manage how AI tools are used across their organisations.

The update also includes more than 50 additional capabilities, covering new visualisations, predictive analytics, data science tools and an upgraded mobile version of Ask Zia.

Zoho Analytics, used by more than one lakh businesses worldwide, is available on cloud, on-premises and public cloud infrastructure. The latest cloud version is available, while updates to the on-premises version are scheduled for the first quarter of 2027.

The company said pricing remained unchanged, with cloud plans starting at Rs 960 per month, billed annually, for the Basic plan.