Zoho Zia Agents FAQ — this guide answers the 27 real questions raised during a live Zoho Zia Agents webinar, organized by category: pricing and licensing, Zoho One integration status, data security, technical configuration, and deployment. Several questions genuinely have no official Zoho answer yet – we’ve noted those honestly rather than guessing, since knowing what’s still unresolved is as useful as knowing what’s confirmed.

Pricing, licensing, and Zoho One status

Is Zia Agents included in Zoho One? Not currently. Zia Agents isn’t fully bundled into a Zoho One subscription yet – most users need to create a separate Zia Agents organization, and Zoho One integration is described as a gradual rollout rather than a finished feature.

What does it cost? The Zia Agents platform itself is free. The only charge is LLM usage – whichever model you select (Zoho Hosted LLM, OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, or another external provider) bills at that provider’s own rate. Zoho Hosted LLM specifically includes 30 million free tokens per month, which covers most testing and a meaningful amount of production use before any cost applies. If a new organization shows “billed separately” during setup, that’s a labeling artifact of the multi-org structure, not an unexpected charge – testing stays free within the token allowance.

How do I configure models on a fresh account? Enable ZKS (Zoho’s key management layer) to unlock the free credits, create a new organization, select the preferred LLM, and begin building agents from there.

Data security and privacy

How does PII masking actually work? When an agent handles information that could be personally identifiable – an email address, a phone number, other personal data – that data is encoded into a secure format before it’s sent to the LLM, and decoded again only after the response comes back. This whole process operates within the organization’s existing Role-Based Access Control settings, so masking layers on top of permissions rather than working around them.

Does an agent get direct database access? No – agents only reach data through explicitly authorized Read APIs and approved tools. There is no direct database connection at any point, which means even a misconfigured or unexpectedly-prompted agent can’t query anything beyond what it’s been specifically granted.

Technical configuration

Can Zia Agents parse unstructured emails? Yes, both structured and unstructured emails are supported, though accuracy depends on the email’s consistency, complexity, and the quality of the prompt guiding the parsing. There’s no predefined Email Parser agent specifically, but Zoho does provide a pre-built Email Categorizer Agent, and a custom parser can be built for more specific needs.

What can serve as a Knowledge Base? FAQs, policy documents, manuals, general documentation, and PDF files are all supported – any open document format works, with no predefined template required. Direct database tables are not supported as a Knowledge Base source.

How do I know which tools or APIs to select? This comes down to the specific business use case and the operations actually required – reviewing the relevant API documentation and selecting only the necessary endpoints is the current approach. Zoho’s upcoming Model Context Protocol (MCP) support is expected to simplify this tool-selection process considerably once it rolls out.

Can custom functions be used? Yes – Catalyst Functions and Zoho CRM Custom Functions both work today as the current options, with dedicated post-processing custom functions planned as an upcoming addition. Agent prompt length is governed by the context window of whichever LLM is selected, so longer prompts require a model with a larger context window.

Deployment and integrations

Can agents research the internet or be deployed on a website? Yes to both. Internet research works through tools like the Catalyst SmartBrowz API or the Google Search API, configured as needed. Website deployment uses ChatKit snippets or direct embedding, and agents can also be deployed across various messaging channels. Pre-built agents for Zoho Desk are available directly from the Agent Store.

Can CRM data be sent to a third-party AI? Yes – the supported architecture routes a Zia Agent’s request through a COQL query, out to the third-party AI, and back through the Zia Agent to produce the final response. This flow is supported through Zoho’s APIs rather than requiring a workaround.

Questions with no official answer yet

Several genuinely good questions came up during the webinar that Zoho didn’t provide an official answer to at the time. Rather than guess, here’s what’s still open: whether agents can run on a fixed schedule instead of being trigger-based; whether the Agent API accepts an instruction prompt as a parameter passed directly in code; whether users can access agents without also having CRM access; the specifics of a proposed WhatsApp integration flow (draft an email reply, send the draft to WhatsApp for approval, then send); and why two different Zia Agent organizations – one standalone, one under a Zoho One organization – show different available menu options (Tools, Knowledge, Store, and Connections visible in one but not the other). These are worth checking against Zoho’s own release notes periodically, since several are described as active development areas.

One related item that Zoho did clarify: the Trigger tab was in beta testing at the time and was expected to roll out to production accounts shortly after – worth checking your account directly if it’s still missing, since beta timelines shift.

Frequently asked questions