Zoho ropes in
AI CoCreator

Zoho Corporation has expanded its low-code application development platform, Zoho Creator, with new AI-powered capabilities. Omne of the most powerful, CoCreator, is an AI assistant that streamlines app creation using voice commands, written prompts, process flows, and business specification documents.

Powered by Zia, Zoho’s AI assistant since 2015, CoCreator facilitates faster app development without additional costs, democratising the process for users of all skill levels. The update includes advanced features such as Idea-to-App Generation, AI Skills, and contextual component generation to enhance the app-building experience.

Zoho says it is committed to investing in AI capabilities that offer real-time, practical, and secure advantages to business users.

Zoho’s AI assistant, Zia, integrates across the company’s product suite, including Creator. With control over its technology stack and extensive AI integration, Zoho aims to deliver more comprehensive contextual AI capabilities across all business workflows, positioning itself as a competitive alternative for businesses seeking deeper data insights and predictive functionalities.

“Since we introduced Creator in 2006, our mission has been to make app development simpler and faster, without compromising on functionality,” says Andrew Bourne, regional head of Zoho South Africa.

“AI now takes us to the next level, shortening the time from an idea to an app. Today’s announcement significantly raises the baseline on speed of quality app creation with deep capabilities, without adding costs.”

Among the new capabilities is the Idea-to-App Generation feature, which enables businesses to use ZohoAI or OpenAI to develop applications including contextual integrations, automations, permission sets and insightful dashboards.

By using text or voice prompts, process flow diagrams, or systems documentations like software requirement specifications (SRS), Creator provides domain-specific suggestions, ideas for relevant fields, and modules tailored to a customer’s business.

Contextual component generation AI enhances existing applications by offering prompt-based form generation. Zia proactively suggests contextual fields within forms, a functionality missing from many low-code development platforms. Developers of different skill levels can generate and optimise code blocks contextually within apps using Zia’s prompter, and annotate existing code blocks for future maintenance.

Users can transform unstructured data from various file types and databases into custom applications and remove inconsistencies using the AI-driven data cleansing and modelling feature. The new AI Skills enables businesses to build apps with specialised skills that interpret natural language instructions in the business context and automate complex chains of actions intelligently. This feature is currently in early access and is set to launch in June 2025.

Additional enhancements include document uploads that enable extraction of relevant information into an application that can then be queried easily; voice-based app generation from mobile devices; and deploying custom AI models for deploying capabilities like OCR, prediction, and object detection.

Zoho AI

Zoho says it maintains a focus on AI innovation centred on customer privacy and value delivery. Its generic AI models in contextual, assistive, and agentic categories are not trained on consumer data and do not store customer information, emphasising responsible AI practices. The company prioritises practical AI tools designed to assist workers, optimising model sizes without increasing costs for customers.