FEATURE: AI INNOVATION
Privacy-first AI
SaaS growth in numbers
• US $ 1.32 billion – Hong Kong SaaS market size in 2025
• US $ 3.24 billion – Projected size by 2030
• 19.72 % CAGR – Growth rate over five years
• US $ 36.7 billion – Economic benefits from AI adoption by 2030
A key differentiator is Zoho’ s privacy-first approach. While many enterprises rely on third-party AI providers, Zoho enables customers to keep their data within its ecosystem.
The company also supports integrations with ChatGPT, Llama and DeepSeek – but Zia LLM ensures customers can enjoy AI innovation without compromising sensitive business information.
Zoho’ s rising momentum in Hong Kong
To support this momentum, Zoho has deepened its engagement with the Hong Kong market, reporting 16 % year-on-year revenue growth in 2024 across its customer experience and productivity solutions portfolio.
This reflects growing adoption of Zoho’ s integrated suite of enterprise-grade SaaS offerings which help organisations:
• Streamline operations
• Improve collaboration
• Scale efficiently with AI and automation
At Zoholics Hong Kong 2025, held at the Kowloon Shangri-La, the company highlighted three key announcements:
1. Zia LLM – Zoho’ s proprietary large language model 2. Zia Hubs – AI-driven content hubs for enterprise data 3. CRM for Everyone – New AI-driven features for collaboration and orchestration
Zia LLM: AI built in-house for business
Zoho unveiled its proprietary large language model, Zia LLM, developed entirely in-house using NVIDIA’ s AI accelerated computing platform.
Unlike generic AI models, Zia LLM is specifically designed for business use cases, including:
• Structured data extraction
• Summarisation
• Retrieval-augmented generation( RAG)
• Code generation
The system is built on three models – 1.3 billion, 2.6 billion and 7 billion parameters – giving Zoho flexibility to right-size models for different contexts. This is pitched as helping balance performance with cost efficiency.
Zia LLM at a glance
• Trained entirely in-house on Zoho product use cases
• Three parameter models( 1.3B, 2.6B, 7B)
• Optimised for contextual applicability
• Benchmarks competitively with open-source models
• Built with customer privacy at the core
36 INTELLIGENTCIO APAC www. intelligentcio. com