The traditional segregation of people’s digital experience at work into separate functional applications is rapidly coming to an end, hastened by the rise of AI. This week, Zoho has responded with a new user experience for its Zoho One application suite, which cuts across the boundaries between both its own and third-party applications. Raju Vegesna, Chief Evangelist at Zoho, says: What if we can take all of these applications we currently have about 50 different applications in Zoho One and make them behave like a single application? Where you remove the boundaries between these applications and the data, and make the entire thing behave like a single, unified experience, where the context becomes the king. That’s what we are doing with the new version of Zoho One. We are organizing applications based on how people do the work. Zoho is layering three cross-application layers into the Zoho One offering to enable this new experience new ways to view data and take actions, a unified integration layer, and cross-application AI capabilities. The overall theme is to bring data and actions to users in the natural flow of work, rather than forcing them to skip between separate applications to find answers or get things done. As Vegesna puts it: It doesn’t matter which application you are using, you should not go to the application. The application should come to you, because context is the key. Contextual spaces The new starting point for Zoho One users is a set of contextual spaces that gather together apps, information and action lists. A personal space brings together the individual’s frequently used tools, there are functional spaces for sales, finance and other departmental teams, and an organization space for apps focused on company-wide communication. These workspaces can be customized or new ones created, and they can incorporate third-party apps alongside the Zoho One apps. Boards within these spaces pull together information from various sources, not only dashboards with a range of data and analytics from various sources, but also task lists, project overviews or shared email inboxes. An action panel groups items requiring attention, including upcoming meetings, uncompleted tasks, unread messages or emails, and so on. Continuing the theme of new ways to interact with enterprise data and processes, Zoho One now also includes Vani, the new visual collaboration app by Zoho which launched recently. Integrations aim to incorporate third-party apps into the same flow of work, and can also be included in workflows, such as an employee onboarding or offboarding process. A unified portal consolidates each app-specific portal into a single screen, and there is a single admin panel for managing integrations. Vegesna comments: Integrations is a critical piece, because on top of using the Zoho applications, our customers use a lot of third-party applications as well. Making these third-party applications like a first party is one of the key goals here. The integration layer also connects into Zoho’s directory services and user authentication. This enables single sign-on and ensures that users and the AI capabilities they work with are only able to access resources they have the correct permissions for. Vegesna comments: The permission layer plays a very critical role. I think nobody can do a solid AI strategy and implementation if you do not have a directory system in there. AI in the flow of work AI is incorporated across this unified experience, with AI-powered enterprise search and the Ask Zia AI assistant available from the Zoho One status bar. The goal is to integrate AI into the user’s flow of work, as Vegesna explains: The beauty about Zoho One is because we have a broad suite of applications that are deeply integrated on our stack, and have the context that enables the intelligence. We are not calling it out separately, we are basically embedding it contextually so that the user does not even know that they’re using AI here. And obviously it is built on our infrastructure stack that is integrated, not just within Zoho, but also third-party, with the MCP servers, connecting to 200+ third-party sources. For example, the Zia Hubs content organizer automatically gathers all documents a user has signed and all the meetings they’ve recorded, making it easy to then get answers to questions such as, ‘Which of my contracts auto renew in the next three months?’ or ‘What are my urgent to-dos from last week’s meetings?’ Users can also build their own content hubs, such as all documents related to HR. AI analytics can increasingly run cross-application too. Vegesna explains: Something that we are slowly rolling out is mixing and matching the data, like how much time each of our employees spent with this particular account. That requires pulling the data across systems. We’re talking about the HR system and the ticketing system, pulling the data from the HR and from the CRM system as well, and combining the data. A final AI element is its knowledge of all the apps and their capabilities across the Zoho One family, which means that the assistant can guide users on how to get things done, without them having to learn the individual apps and their features. Vegesna gives the example of setting up a social media campaign: Now users can say, ‘Hey, I’m trying to do, let’s say an Instagram campaign. Does Zoho have a tool for that?’ Now, Zia can guide them, and can say, ‘Hey, here is a tool in Zoho Social, and you can enable it, and this is how you can do an Instagram campaign.’ So Zia is trained on all 50 tools within Zoho and can guide the user in the context of Zoho One. My take Established application vendors are having to adapt fast to the advent of AI, which is accelerating a long-term trend towards more conversational interfaces that cut across traditional application boundaries. We’ve gotten used to having to dive into different functional applications to get things done at work, but this is an artificial divide that’s been forced on us by the limitations of earlier generations of technology. Connected digital infrastructure, enhanced with AI, is now powerful enough to break through those artificial boundaries and bring us the data and actions we need when we need them. With its family of Zoho One applications on a single platform, Zoho is well placed to break apart those traditional functional apps and bring users what they need in the flow of work. As Vegesna says: What we are doing with this release is basically laying the foundation on the next evolution, particularly with the AI-centric world. Context plays a key role. Unification plays a key role. The experience plays a key role. And being the front door to their work becomes a key role, and that is what we are laying with this version. Clearly there’s more to come on this journey. We’ll watch with interest.
https://diginomica.com/zoho-one-adds-ai-ready-ux-cuts-across-app-boundaries
Zoho One adds an AI-ready UX that cuts across app boundaries
