Telecom
Zoho Launches Zia LLM, and Expands AI Suite with Agents and Studio Tools
Zoho, a global technology company announced the launch of Zia LLM—the company’s proprietary large language model, a no-code agent builder, Zia Agent Studio, over 25 deployable Zia agents, and a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server to open up Zoho’s vast library of actions to third-party agents.
“Today’s announcement emphasises Zoho’s longstanding aim to build foundational technology focused on protection of customer data, breadth and depth of capabilities because of the business context, and value,” said Kehinde Ogundare, Country Head, Zoho Nigeria. “Our LLM model is trained specifically for business use cases, keeping privacy and governance at its core, which has resulted in lowering the inference cost, passing on that value to the customers, while also ensuring that they are able to utilise AI productively and efficiently.”
Zia LLM: Custom-Built AI for the Enterprise
Zoho has successfully launched its own large language model, Zia LLM, built completely in-house by leveraging NVIDIA’s AI accelerated computing platform. Trained with Zoho product use cases in mind—ranging from structured data extraction, summarisation, RAG, and code generation—Zia LLM comprises three models with 1.3 billion, 2.6 billion and 7 billion parameters, each separately trained and optimised for contextual applicability that benchmark competitively against comparable open source models in the market. The three models allow Zoho to always optimise the right model for the right user context, striking the balance between power and resource management. This focus on right-sizing the model is an ongoing development strategy for Zoho. In the short term, Zoho will scale Zia LLM’s model sizes, starting with the first set of parameter increases by the end of 2025.
While Zoho supports many LLM integrations for users, including ChatGPT, Llama, and DeepSeek, Zia LLM continues Zoho’s commitment to data privacy by allowing customers to keep their data on Zoho servers, leveraging the latest AI capabilities without sending their data to AI cloud providers. The model is currently testing for internal use cases across Zoho’s broad app portfolio, and will be available for customer use in coming months.
Zoho also announced two proprietary Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models for speech-to-text conversion for English and Hindi. Optimised to perform on a low computer load without compromising on accuracy, the models benchmark up to 75% better than comparable models across standard tests. Zoho will expand language support for ASR models to enable more inclusive AI adoption across diverse regions. It will also introduce a reasoning language model (RLM).
Prebuilt Agents, Agent Studio and Marketplace Designed for Real-World Impact
To enable immediate adoption of agentic technology, Zoho has developed a roster of AI agents contextually baked right into its products. These agents can be used across various business activities, handling relevant actions based on the role of the user. These include Customer Service Agent for Zoho Desk that can process incoming customer requests, understand the context, and either answer directly or triage them to a human rep, providing an efficient first line of assistance.
Ask Zia, Zoho’s platform-wide conversational AI assistant, is bolstered with additional BI skills, tailored to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists, while supporting all users within an organisation. It can build end-to-end data pipelines for engineers, analyse data, create reports and dashboards in an interactive conversation mode for analysts, or help jump start building ML models for data scientists.
First announced earlier in 2025, Zoho has further simplified the Zia Agent Studio experience to be fully prompt-based (with the option to use low-code) and includes ready-made access to over 700 actions across Zoho’s products. Agents built by users can be deployed autonomously, triggered by button click, with rule-based automation, or even summoned within customer conversations.
At the time of deployment, an agent can be provisioned as a digital employee, maintaining the user access permission structure defined within the organisation. Admins can perform behavioural audits as well as performance and impact analyses on digital employees, ensuring that every agent is working as effectively as possible and within clear guardrails.
Several pre-built agents are now available for users, such as Candidate Screener, which identifies and ranks the most suitable candidates for a specific job opening based on role requirements, skills, experience, and other key attributes; Deal Analyser, which can analyse deals and provide insights such as win probability, next best action, and follow-up suggestions, and Revenue Growth Specialist, which suggests opportunities for upsell and cross-sell for existing customers.
These agents are available in Agent Marketplace from where customers can easily deploy them. Ecosystem partners, ISVs, and individual developers will be able to create agents and host them on the Zia Agents Marketplace in coming months.
The company plans to add more skills to Ask Zia, allowing it to act as an assistant to Finance teams, Customer Support teams to start with. Support for the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol will be implemented, allowing Zia Agents to interact and collaborate with each other, as well as collaborate with agents on other platforms.
Interoperability and Governance
Zoho’s adoption of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) allows clients to securely access and interact with workflows and actions across over 15 Zoho applications. MCP is available in early access, and integrations via Zoho Flow extend its reach to third-party tools. Zoho Analytics now also supports a local MCP server, allowing for advanced contextual AI use cases while preserving data security and compliance.
Nigeria’s telecom operators recorded 155, 397 fibre-cut incidents between April and May 2026, and these they blame on why internet or calls suddenly stop working.
Data from the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) showed fibre-cut incidents increased from 74 276 in April to a record 79 121 in May, bringing the two-month total to the highest level recorded by the industry.
This represents a 2 428% increase from the 5 934 incidents reported during the first quarter of 2026.
Vandalism remained the leading cause of fibre cuts, accounting for more than 54 000 incidents despite telecom infrastructure being designated as Critical National Information Infrastructure, a classification intended to strengthen protection of key digital assets.
Also road construction constantly damages fiber where iggers and machines tear up buried cables during road repairs or construction.
Even with all these, some state governments make it hard for companies to fix cables quickly across different areas with all manners of fees and levies.
The NCC designation provides for penalties of up to 10 years’ imprisonment for offenders, but operators continue to face widespread infrastructure damage.
Proposed solutions, including Nigeria’s Dig-Once policy and AI-powered fibre sensing technologies, have yet to achieve widespread adoption.
The NCC is developing a cost-based framework for shared underground duct infrastructure, while operators are exploring AI-powered fibre sensing technologies that can detect cable damage in real time and improve network resilience.
Nigeria is pursuing ambitious broadband targets under its National Broadband Plan and has expanded fibre deployment to about 35 000 kilometres.
However, infrastructure protection has not kept pace with network expansion, leaving subscribers vulnerable to unreliable connectivity despite continued operator investment.
Standard Bank has partnered with Helios Towers to provide a $29 million Social Documentary Credit Facility. According to the financial services company, this transaction marks Standard Bank’s first Documentary Credit Facility structured in a Sustainable Finance format.
It notes that the facility will support the procurement and importation of telecommunications infrastructure and related services across Africa.
It will also provide payment certainty to suppliers, while supporting Helios Towers’ working capital requirements and infrastructure expansion programme, the bank adds.
Structured in accordance with the Loan Market Association’s Social Loan Principles, the financing is designed to promote digital connectivity and telecommunications infrastructure development in underserved markets.
This will help Helios Towers further expand its footprint and enhance mobile network coverage and connectivity across the continent.
Helios Towers operates one of Africa’s independent telecommunications tower platforms, enabling mobile network operators to extend coverage across multiple markets.
Standard Bank notes that the facility supports the expansion of tower infrastructure and services, increased network densification and improved connectivity in underserved markets and remote regions across the African continent.
It will also drive digital inclusion and tackle the digital divide while supporting economic growth and socio-economic development.
“This transaction demonstrates the power of innovation in trade finance. By combining a first-to-market Social Documentary Credit Facility with a cross-border funding solution, Standard Bank has supported Helios Towers’ growth ambitions while helping extend digital connectivity to underserved communities across Africa,” says Benoit Samouilhan, global transaction banker at Standard Bank Corporate and Investment Banking.
According to the bank, this facility enables positive social impact by increasing and improving network coverage and connectivity in some of the world’s most remote regions.
“Reliable digital infrastructure is fundamental to Africa’s future growth and development,” says Alex Carter, group finance director at Helios Towers.
“This facility provides us with the flexibility and certainty needed to support our ongoing infrastructure investments while advancing our mission of expanding connectivity across the continent. We value our longstanding relationship with Standard Bank and look forward to building on this partnership.”
Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) will on Thursday convene a stakeholders’ consultative forum to review the draft business rules for Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs) in Nigeria.
NCC
The forum, scheduled to hold at 10 a.m. at the NCC Annex Office, Mbora, Abuja, is expected to bring together telecommunications operators, industry associations and other stakeholders to provide input on the proposed regulatory framework before its finalisation.
The commission announced the event on its official social media platforms, inviting interested stakeholders to participate in the consultation process.
The engagement is part of the NCC’s efforts to strengthen the regulatory framework for MVNO operations and promote greater competition, innovation and consumer choice in Nigeria’s telecommunications sector.
Mobile Virtual Network Operators are telecommunications service providers that offer mobile services by leasing network capacity from licensed Mobile Network Operators (MNOs), rather than owning spectrum licences or telecommunications infrastructure.
The NCC has identified the MVNO licensing framework as one of its initiatives aimed at deepening competition, expanding access to telecommunications services and driving digital inclusion across the country.
The consultative forum is expected to provide stakeholders with the opportunity to review the draft business rules, make recommendations and contribute to the development of a robust operational framework for the emerging MVNO segment.
The commission is expected to issue further details on the outcome of the consultation after the meeting.
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