Most organizations are familiar with a business intelligence dashboard. Data is gathered, insights are generated, and somewhere between the finding and the action, the momentum dies. Useful, practical information is quietly ignored.

Zoho has been thinking about this problem for a long time. In a “Two Questions with Opus Research” conversation at ZohoDay 2026 in Austin, Lead Analyst Ian Jacobs asks Sailas Sundaram, head of strategy for Zoho’s Data & BI platform, how the company is adding AI to its BI stack and ways they’re rethinking what analytics are for.

Zoho launched Ask Zia in 2018 as a natural language query tool. It’s become something more ambitious: a multi-skilled, multilingual agent pluggable across Zoho’s own models and external LLMs, designed to let anyone in the organization get questions answered and actions taken from plain language input. The gap between “answered” and “actions taken” is where most BI investments stall.

In the video below, Sundaram outlines a killer use case where AI detects an anomaly in customer sentiment, automatically triggers a CRM workflow, and puts a proactive alert in front of the account manager — before the customer starts evaluating alternatives. The intelligence doesn’t stop at the insight. It reaches into the execution layer and does something about it.

Listen here to the conversation at ZohoDay 2026 to learn how BI reporting can trigger automated actions. and how Zoho has been building toward that loop quietly for years.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Articles