Zoho Corp., a global technology company offering a unified, privacy-centric software suite designed to power every aspect of business operations, is expanding its artificial intelligence (AI) strategy in the Philippines as more companies look for practical ways to adopt AI without adding costs or security risks.
The company said its Philippine business grew 21% year over year in 2025, showing increasing demand for integrated cloud software. Globally, Zoho surpassed one million paying customers in early 2026.
The announcement comes as the Philippine government pushes digital transformation, with the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) targeting a digital economy that contributes 12% of the country’s gross domestic product. The country’s 2026 ASEAN chairmanship has also put responsible AI adoption and AI-powered growth for micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) high on the regional agenda.
Zoho introduced new AI capabilities during its Zoholics Manila 2026 user conference, including Zia Agents, an expanded Zoho One platform, and updates designed to help businesses automate routine work while keeping data secure.
“Filipino businesses are figuring out how to adopt AI without driving up costs or creating new security gaps as they scale,” said Gibu Mathew, managing director, Zoho APAC. “At Zoholics this year, we are demonstrating how Zoho’s unified platform, and owned infrastructure seamlessly integrates with proprietary and global AI models to give businesses a practical path to realizing the benefits of agentic AI.”
Mathew added that Zoho’s technology approach will give businesses access to the latest technology, to help balance total cost of ownership, without compromising on data privacy or operational control.
Zia Agents enables companies to deploy AI assistants for different business functions, including sales, customer service, human resources, account management, and IT support. Businesses can also create their own AI agents through Zia Agent Studio using low-code or no-code tools, while an Agent Marketplace allows partners and developers to share specialized AI agents.
Zoho also highlighted enhancements to Zoho One, its all-in-one business software platform used by more than 75,000 organizations worldwide. The platform now combines business applications, workflows, and AI tools into a single system to reduce the need for multiple disconnected applications. Ask Zia serves as an AI assistant across applications to help users find information and make decisions faster.
Zoho said Zoho One continues to cost $37 per user per month despite the added AI capabilities.
The company is positioning privacy and security as key differentiators. Zoho said customer data is not used to train general AI models, while its proprietary Zia large language model is hosted in Zoho-operated data centers, giving organizations an option to keep AI workloads within the Zoho environment.
The strategy addresses a growing challenge for businesses. Zoho’s State of Workforce Password Security 2026 report found that 64% of Asia-Pacific organizations use more than 15 business applications, yet 73% lack full visibility into employee identity and access, increasing operational and security complexity as AI adoption grows.