Manal Saleh

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, 2 November 2026: Zoho Corp. a leading global technology company, revealed a major evolution of its business reporting tool, Zoho Analytics, turning into an "Agentic Analytics" platform. Moving beyond traditional reporting and dashboards, the updated platform acts as a trusted intelligence layer that gives AI agents the context they need to understand data and take real business actions.

As enterprises accelerate their AI adoption, a primary bottleneck is the lack of context in which AI models struggle to understand unique corporate terminology, departmental relationships, and internal governance rules. Zoho’s new native architecture solves this by embedding business context directly into the analytics core, eliminating the need for complex, disconnected external data warehouses. The platform's features are available across the UAE and KSA data centres.

"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 Hyther Nizam, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) at Zoho, Middle East and Africa (MEA). "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."



Zoho Analytics finely tunes its data intelligence by modelling its structure on an organisation's data. The semantic layer serves as a business glossary for AI, defining key terms, metrics and their meaning, helping AI interpret data in the context of an organisation's operations. The ontology layer models business entities, their relationships, and how they connect across the organisation, helping AI generate insights and recommendations that are relevant to the real business needs. With strict governance and clear oversight into each step of its process, Zoho Analytics helps businesses manage data access, cost, reduce errors and maintain control over how information is used by agents, in this nascent AI regulatory landscape.

The intelligence layer delivers trusted, repeatable and pervasive intelligence, enabling Agentic AI to ask, understand, decide, and act based on highly informed data, tailored to each unique business. Ask Zia, a conversational super-agent for Business Intelligence is built with a multi-agent architecture across data analysis, data modelling, visualisation, data preparation, coding and actions. A central agent plans and orchestrates takes specialised sub-agents, all working off the same semantic layer, ontology and conversation context. This enables users to move naturally between tasks — for example, starting with an analysis and then creating a data pipeline to prepare data for further use — without losing the context of the conversation. For specific functions, users can build custom agents that are grounded with the same data, semantic model and knowledge base as Ask Zia. With support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), these agents can connect with external tools and systems, in addition to built-in tools from Zoho Analytics. With this evolution, Zoho Analytics brings data analysis, business context, AI-powered insights, and agent-driven workflows together in one platform, helping businesses move from data to decisions and action with greater confidence.

Unlike competitors, the semantic and ontology layers are native to Zoho Analytics, and arrive in the box, not requiring a separate data platform or cloud data warehouse. Users can create multiple semantic models for different contexts, so finance and operations departments each get the definitions that fit their work. Apache Ossie compatibility means that a company's definitions are portable, and not locked inside of Zoho. Businesses can build and edit semantic models without code. Additionally, developers can leverage headless BI capabilities, local and remote MCP servers, and a new command-line interface to embed analytics and intelligent agents directly into external applications and developer workflows, including a dedicated Claude plug-in.

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