Marry one of the world’s most powerful business software platforms with AI capabilities. The result allows businesses of all types and sizes to create new workspaces. It enables teams to integrate native and third party apps. And it frees your employees to share data easily across your organization while maintaining critical security features.

Witness the remarkable new iteration of Zoho One. And reimagine your business as teams share insights across over 50 applications and third party apps from Google, Microsoft, Quickbooks and more.

“Now we have about 75,000 customers using Zoho One,” explains Raju Vegesna, Chief Evangelist at Zoho. “These customers are distributed all over the world and the average number of applications they use is around 22 to 23 and that has been growing and that option has been pretty significant across various org sizes, small to mid-size to enterprises as well.”

The new AI enhanced Zoho One unifies features across 50+ Zoho apps and third party integrations in a variety of ways.

One layer of integration involves Spaces, divided into Personal, Organization and Department. Take a look at how these are arranged below.

Get the Personal Touch

Say you operate a Seattle-based coffee roaster – with national distribution.

Each member of your marketing department needs personal productivity tools. Think design tools to work on the elements of a campaign and file storage to upload those assets. They also likely need a chat feature to discuss projects with other members of the team.

“You know, sometimes we want to just put our head down and do the work … and we need our own space for ourselves, that is the personal space.” adds Vegesna. “So we created a personal space with relevant tools that you may use.”

Each member of your sales team needs email to receive leads and video-call features to follow up with potential cafes or supermarket chains potentially interested in carrying your coffee.

But instead of popping in and out of 10 or 20 applications, Zoho One’s new integration offers a magic trick.

Abracadabra and each member creates a Personal Space where emails can be read and sent, calls made and files stored and shared.

All this happens within a dashboard created to improve productivity.

Expect to compete with big brands like Starbucks and Peet’s Coffee in no time, as Zoho One supercharges your sales and marketing teams.

These individuals require personal space to do their work but also they look for ways to share quickly with other members of the team.

Fortunately other aspects of Zoho One’s unified new approach fill just this need. Stay tuned.

Keep Your Organization Communicating

Of course, you also need a way to communicate and collaborate across your organization.

“If you’re in a collaboration mode within your entire organisation, well you get into the Organisation Space where there are a lot of tools out there that can help with various collaborations that you may do – various forms of collaboration.” Vegesna adds.

Say you operate a real estate brokerage in Reading, Pennsylvania. But you have regional agents throughout several counties in the Southeastern part of the state.

You need tools to help you bring those agents together on a regular basis, even when spread out over 50 miles or more.

Town Halls

The Organization Space enables you to set up town halls with your agents wherever they are located.

Set up your town halls with clearly defined durations and agendas. For example, establish a Monday morning session to update agents on new listings and the progress on existing listings.

Share exciting news on offers received as well as successful closings and other landmark accomplishments.

Set up another town hall midweek, perhaps an ask me anything session for new agents who are just learning the ropes.

Forums

Use Forums to help agents collaborate on projects, do more showings and ultimately make more sales.

For example, encourage agents in one county to post their listings, photos, asking price and other details.

This allows realtors in another county who might have the perfect buyer to set up a showing or request more information on the listing with just a few clicks.

Or suppose one realtor has an open house coming up this weekend. Forums provide a place to announce the event and ask other realtors to attend and possibly bring clients who might be interested.

Other Tools

Town Halls and Forums both reside within Zoho Connect. But make no mistake. Our hypothetical real estate brokerage need not get siloed within one application.

You see, the new Zoho One seeks to ease boundaries between apps with simple dashboards allowing collaborating teams to enable or disable apps at will.

“While you may be navigating multiple applications, it feels like a single unified interface across the board,” Vegesna points out.

So our southeastern Pennsylvania real estate company likely also uses Zoho Projects to manage staging of properties or closings on property sales to ensure nothing gets missed.

But the company also uses Zoho Social to create campaigns for individual properties – or to bring in new listings.

“So users can create multiple dashboards, pulling data across multiple applications and the default dashboards that we create themselves pull data across the operating system,” Vegesna adds.

Cool, huh?

Improve Departmental Efficiency

But most importantly, the new Zoho One’s philosophy of unification tackles the big daddy of all business challenges, departmental efficiency.

Miss this important detail and your business always ends up throwing more money out the window than you take in at the door.

The new Zoho One allows teams to create dashboards for any department you can imagine – using any tools they need.

“They are organized whether it is CRM related, whether it is HR related, support related,” Vegesna begins. “If you want to add any of these, like a help desk overview, you pin it in or you add that and it kind of shows up here.”

Imagine the accounts receivable department of a collection agency in Santa Fe, New Mexico working mainly with local hospitals and other healthcare providers.

Few businesses better exemplify the connection between departmental efficiency and profitability.

Fail to track delinquent accounts, schedule calls to make payment arrangements or track and process payments made? You soon face angry clients and the possibility of cancelled contracts.

Fortunately, a variety of Zoho tools provide the perfect solution.

Use Zoho Billing’s Accounts Receivable Aging Summary to identify delinquent accounts.

Employ Zoho Projects to create a ticket system for contact and payment negotiations. Then use Zoho Payments to make paying down that debt effortless.

Zoho Books helps track incoming payments from customers – as well as the cost of collection.

Create a dashboard – or multiple dashboards – and give your team a 40,000 foot view of your collection operations.

This allows piling up delinquent accounts, delays in contact, delayed payments and excessive costs in the collection process to stick out more clearly.

“What if we can take all of these applications … and make them behave like a single application – and where you remove the boundaries between these applications on the data and make the entire thing behave like a single unified experience where the context becomes the king?” Vegesna muses.

Can you see the potential?

New Zoho One Puts Ghost in Machine with Zia

Another important change in the new version of Zoho One happens to be the further integration of Zia – Zoho’s AI assistant.

AI already featured prominently in Zoho’s offerings. But the new Zoho One incorporates Zia into almost everything.

“So Zia is kind of sprinkled throughout the operating system,” Vegesna explains.

For example, Zia helps Zoho take its famous low code app building feature in Zoho Creator to a whole new level.

Zoho Creator already makes app creation a breeze with its simple drag and drop elements. But now give Zia a prompt and it builds what you want and even installs it.

Say you needed a checklist of CRM or other tasks for the day.

Or, as in the example of our imaginary accounts receivable department above, you need outstanding invoices ordered by the due date. This allows your team to track accounts to determine when they have reached delinquency – or when payments are late.

Perhaps you just need a simple way to create a meeting schedule for the day or for the week. This represents just a sampling of the kinds of widgets Zia can whip up for you, according to Zoho.

“It will create a widget for you and plug that right in,” Vegesna explains.

Equally important, Zia helps you sift through reports for important insights.

Vegesna adds, “ For example, in this case, I’m looking at a report. I can expand into it, zoom into it, ask Zia to do some analysis where Zia will give me a summary on that particular report.”

So, Zia parses through huge volumes of information surfacing only the important bits for your project.

Suppose you need the sales numbers on your ecommerce site from 2024 and the first half of 2025. Or perhaps you need a summary of traffic and engagement from your last social media campaign.

Zia scours reports from Zoho Commerce, Zoho Social or any other applications to provide the summaries you need.

Unification of Experience, Intelligence and Integration

Think of the way AI removes barriers between apps and data as a unification of experience.

No longer do you work in Zoho Service Plus or Zoho People Plus or Zoho Marketing Plus. No longer do you work in sales or finance or HR.

Instead, you collaborate across applications with the help of AI. You find the data you need regardless in which department it resides.

Then think of the way Zia works across all applications. It delivers widgets and surfaces and summarizes data to help you better understand what happens across your business not just in one little silo.

Consider this unification of intelligence.

Bringing Third Party – To the Party

This brings us to unified integration.

This integration happens not only between Zoho applications. The new Zoho One also integrates with third party applications – like QuickBooks, Mailchimp, HubSpot and more.

And it allows integration between these third-party applications themselves. So your business gets to choose the tools that work best for you – whether they exist in the Zoho ecosystem or not.

Imagine an SEO firm in Silver Springs, Florida. Perhaps they use Zoho Projects to manage ongoing activities. Perhaps they use tickets for ongoing tasks like optimization of clients’ sites, link building and keyword research activities, for example.

Maybe they also use Zoho CRM to nurture leads from marketing campaigns and bring in new clients.

But when it comes to bookkeeping, they prefer Quickbooks – even though they use Zoho Invoice to bill clients and Zoho Payments to collect fees.

Fortunately, with the new Zoho One, this presents no problem.

“You can bring in third party dashboards as well, plug them right in with single sign-on enable,” Vegesna explains. “You get a complete overview of it, and then the concept of boards and removing the boundaries is a critical piece and we don’t restrict it to dashboards themselves.”

Perhaps our Florida SEO company also uses GoDaddy to host the websites it builds for clients and for the domain name registration that goes along with this.

Vegesna further explains how this integration in particular works.

“So to make it really simple, we have also partnered with GoDaddy, where within the domain unification, all you need to do is login to GoDaddy, authorize changes to some of these records, and we will make these changes to their domain with their permission automatically,” he says.

Final Thoughts

No matter what your business needs, the new Zoho One offers over 50 applications to help you achieve your business goals.

More to the point, the new iteration of Zoho One eliminates boundaries that once siloed data and app functionality. It allows businesses to create their own dashboards combining app functionality and moving data seamlessly as needed.

New AI functionality including use of Zoho’s AI assistant Zia across the platform, allows businesses to build widgets and manipulate and summarize data.

The platform upgrade even allows seamless integration with other third party software outside the Zoho ecosystem.

This gives your business ultimate flexibility to choose the tools you want and integrate them the way you want.

Visit the new Zoho One today.

This article, “New Zoho One Uses AI to Reminagine Your Business” was first published on Small Business Trends