Your small business relies on insights gained through the information you gather each day.

A new version of Zoho Analytics offers AI to help you make sense of that information quickly.

The new analytics version features trusted data and business context, agentic analytics and actions, intelligence everywhere and governed AI.

A Breakdown of the New Zoho Analytics

Trusted data and business context allows you to share strong data and semantic information so that Zoho’s Analytics AI understands your business more intimately.

Agentic analytics and actions helps you make critical decisions based on analytics insights and act on those decisions with powerful AI agents.

Intelligence everywhere allows you to unteather yourself from a platform by delivering analytics within any agent, app or workflow you use in your business.

Finally, Zoho’s new analytics platform delivers governed AI with better control, management and monitoring than ever before

But how do small businesses benefit from AI that analyzes your data and turns it into insights?

How AI Driven Analytics Helps Your Small Business

Say you run a small chain of laundromats in a few neighboring rust belt communities in northeastern Pennsylvania.

Knowledge of which machines see the highest usage and when helps you decide where to place them in your laundromat to optimize customer experience.

It might also help you decide whether some machines could be eliminated, reducing water and electricity costs.

Tracking the number of cycles for each machine and any irregularities in operations could also help anticipate break downs.

This might not only decrease the amount of time revenue generating machines remain out of order. It might also reduce repair costs if problems with machines are caught early.

A Deeper Dive Into the New Zoho Analytics

Now we plunge deeper into what each of the pillars of Zoho’s new AI driven analytics really offers.

Trusted Data and Business Context

As mentioned above, Zoho Analytics allows you to share data and semantic information allowing Zoho to better understand your business.

“We are investing in providing a strong data and semantic foundation for agents to provide you trusted and reliable outcomes in terms of insights,” explains Clarence Rozario, head of the data and analytics suite at Zoho.

Say you run a chain of coffee shops and a coffee truck in Madison, Wisconsin.

Business seems good but always could be better. And a new cafe just opened in town adding to already fierce competition.

Start with Zoho Analytics’ ontology model. Here you enter the various entities related to your business to better show how your company is structured.

These include things like customers, employees, transactions, and menu items.

But they might also include things like “memberships”, including customers added into your CRM, or “marketing”, including perhaps a Hubspot account or other tools to get the word out.

Model these canonical business entities within Zoho Analytics then describe how they are related to one another.

For example, a “loyalty program” might be linked to other entities such as “purchases” and “reward points” which are all related.

But it doesn’t end there.

You can also map these entities to explain how they fit together.

You then add semantic layers to help Zoho’s AI understand your data within the context of your business operations.

For example, you might build a model explaining the dimensions of your business including locations of different stores, store IDs for each and perhaps layout and number of seats.

Meanwhile, another model might include supplies like espresso beans, whole milk, croissants, plastic cups and straws.

Still another might include calculations for average order cost, the number of customers who purchase coffee and another item or perhaps value and type of customer rewards.

Used correctly, analytics AI helps spot poorly performing food and beverage items which should be struck from your menu, and determines high traffic times to optimize scheduling.

It also helps target repeat visitors so you can send them marketing messages and coupons to bring them in more often.

And it saves money by tracking ingredients used to optimize future ordering.

Agentic Analytics and Actions

Zoho’s new offering also features agentic analytics to help your small business take action on the insights it provides.

“We are trying to bring agents to help users to ask, understand, design and act on the data they are trying to analyze,” says Rozario.

To do this, Zoho brings its powerful AI agent Ask Zia to bear.

“It is designed as a multi-agent architecture which can orchestrate across multiple sub-agents which are going to be pre-packaged.” Rozario adds.

“And the sub-agents include agents for data and doing deeper data analysis, data modeling, visualization, creation, data preparation, coding and actions,” he explains. “And the super agent Ask Zia can coordinate across these different sub-agents and get the work done for you.”

Say you run a chain of family owned grocery stores in the Hudson Valley in New York state.

Popular produce you offer customers includes pineapples from Costa Rica, bok choy from New Jersey and dates from the Coachella Valley in southern California.

But recently sales on all three have begun to decrease. You want to discover the reasons behind these sudden drops in sales.

Begin by asking your AI agents a few simple questions. First, ask for an explanation of what is happening.

An AI agent simply pulls sales and other data explaining that in the case of pineapples, sales declined in the spring.

Sales for bok choy have been plummeting steadily since the beginning of the year. And sales of dates began slipping in late summer.

But your AI agents don’t stop there. You can also ask for a diagnosis. Exactly why are these declines happening.

Remember, you’ve supplied your analytics AI with a huge number of entities from products to transaction details to suppliers.

So your agentic AI draws from all these plus additional semantic layers to answer your questions.

You are told that pineapple sales fall historically in spring and do not rebound until late fall. So this problem seems like nothing new even if your staff might never have noticed anecdotally.

You also learn falling bok choy sales correspond with increased customer complaints over quality and late or inconsistent deliveries by a key distributor.

This impacts the time taken getting produce on the shelves and may lead to more spoilage.

Finally, you learn date quality has declined despite delivery being on time and that this decline tends to happen from summer to early fall corresponding to difficulties in date harvest.

So what do you do next? Ask your agentic AI for suggestions.

Based on the diagnosis, your AI agent suggests decreasing your orders for pineapples during periods when sales are historically low.

It also suggests switching distributors for your bok choy to get more consistent delivery.

Finally it recommends finding a new supplier for dates with fewer production problems between late summer and early fall.

Intelligence Everywhere

Next in line Zoho offers intelligence everywhere.

It’s a big claim for certain!

But Zoho doesn’t want users to feel constrained by an analytics platform and then forced to hop back and forth between that platform and another workflow.

“It should also be available for consumption or for triggering from outside applications or agencies. That’s what intelligence everywhere is all about.,” Rozario adds.

Say you own an accounting firm in Beverly Hills, California and need to create financial reports summarizing ledger excerpts and creating a clear narrative for your client.

Instead of spending hours summarizing and drafting the report yourself, simply enter the entire ledger into your analytics platform.

Then use Zoho Analytics inside an agentic framework like Claude to draft the report in minutes instead of hours.

Governed AI

Finally, you need a way to keep an eye on your AI agents and make sure they are working for your business – not against it.

“We are going to give you tools to control, manage and monitor how agents are working inside the platform.” Rozario explains.

Imagine operating a small convenience store chain in and around Omaha City, Nebraska.

You use inventory and replenishing agents to monitor stock levels and sales trends triggering reorders of products before you run out.

You also use dynamic agents to monitor competitor pricing, wholesale costs and more for gas and other products.

These agents then alter what you charge customers accordingly to stay competitive.

Obviously you want to monitor these agents to avoid costly errors.

For example, agentic AI might miscalculate demand or act on corrupted data leading to overordering or understocking resulting in either higher upfront costs or lower sales.

Zoho analytics offers tools to let you monitor your agents and a sandbox where you can test agentic AI before putting it into service.

The Big Takeaways

So let’s look at the big takeaways from the new Zoho Analytics.

In the old days before agentic analytics burst on the scene, small business owners would need to learn old school business information software to gain insights from their business data.

The alternative involved spending yet more money on an outside analyst. And either solution would involve continuing to check on that data tracking changes and adjusting accordingly.

But today, agentic AI offers a way to do the work for you – and with far less complexity.

Say you run a commercial cleaning business in Detroit, Michigan. You want to keep expensive equipment like floor buffers and carpet extractors up and running.

Let agentic AI track their performance and book maintenance before a costly breakdown occurs.

Use simple questions to identify your biggest business problems. Say you own a hair salon in Sandusky, Ohio, and notice revenue is off. Ask Zia what happened.

Your AI agent can look through your calendar and quickly determine whether appointments have decreased.

Ask Zia why and it may scour customer comments for changes in sentiment. Your customers have been complaining about long wait times.

Ask Zia what to do. It may suggest scheduling appointments further apart to give staff more time to provide adequate service.

Or it might suggest hiring new staff to decrease wait times for the customers you already have.

But small businesses need not automate their entire business right out of the gate.

Afterall, completing full ontologies and semantic layers from all the data in your business can prove time consuming at first.

And small businesses can use the updated Zoho Analytics with the apps and data they already have.

For example, suppose you run an ecommerce business selling gifts and memorabilia from your hometown of Denver, Colorado.

Zoho Analytics already offers integration with many popular ecommerce platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce and Adobe Commerce, also known as Magento.

So Zoho can already access data on orders, returns, product performance etc. Add more advanced features when time allows.

But for now, the updated Zoho Analytics brings new life to your existing data so you can hit the ground running.

Finally, the new agenitc Zoho Analytics offers you and your employees both data democratization and sovereignty.

You decide who gets information and the kind of information they can obtain.

For example, the traveling sales team for your commercial cleaning supplies distributor needs access to the data necessary to generate proposals, quotes and perhaps even contracts.

However contributors to your highly successful website do not need access to insights about visitor behavior and general user experience that could be useful to a competitor.

What Customers Say

Zoho customers share thoughts about the new Zoho Analytics too.

“Zoho Analytics has become our central marketing analysis hub,” says Jeff Hawley, vice president of marketing at American Music and Sound in Berlin, Connecticut.

The company sells musical instruments and equipment.

“It’s where we merge data from different apps to get a complete view delivering us integrated marketing and sales intelligence,” Hawley explains. “The new agentic version of Zoho Analytics has significantly simplified our data analysis. Anyone at Jam Industries can now interact with Ask Zia, explore data, uncover actionable insights and make informed business decisions with ease. We absolutely love the new launch!”

Another customer uses Zoho’s new agentic analytics to boost performance within the company.

“We’ve had tremendous success with Zoho Analytics, using data to improve visibility, drive accountability and support better business decisions across our organization,” says David Fauser, vice president of sales, marketing and strategy for CIMCO Refrigeration.

The Burlington, Ontario firm provides sustainable thermal solutions across North America.

“What excites us about this next evolution is the ability to combine data, business context and AI into a single intelligence layer.,” Fauser adds. “These new capabilities align closely with our AI strategy, which is focused on turning information into action, helping our people make better decisions faster, improve productivity and spend more time creating value for our customers.”

In Conclusion

Data driven insights can make or break your small business.

Your burger joint in Richmond, Virginia may succeed or fail based on predicting the busiest times of day and overall weekly order volumes to help with staffing and stocking supplies.

A new version of Zoho Analytics offers trusted data and business context, agentic analytics and actions, intelligence everywhere and governed AI.

These features provide the data analysis to make your business a success.

Visit Zoho Analytics today to learn more or sign up for free.

This article, “New Zoho Analytics AI Helps Businesses Transform Information Into Success” was first published on Small Business Trends