Zoho cofounder and Chief Scientist Sridhar Vembu expects Artificial Intelligence to significantly increase software development productivity, with gains potentially reaching 4 to 5 times and possibly 10 times as AI systems become more capable.
Speaking to CNBC-TV18, Vembu said software productivity has already improved by around 30% to 50% across the full product release cycle as companies increasingly adopt AI in development.
His comments came as Zoho launched Zia Chat, an AI interface that allows employees to search information, understand business context and perform tasks across applications through a conversational interface.
“We are combining the unstructured intelligence, all of the global knowledge that is there in LLMs, with the very structured information available in the enterprise in all of the Zoho apps,” Vembu said.
Zia Chat combines enterprise data models and business context with AI, allowing users to examine presentations, update calendars, send emails and messages, and perform other tasks through conversational interactions.
Vembu does not expect AI to eliminate software jobs. Instead, he believes demand will increasingly shift towards industry-specific software and domain expertise as AI takes on more coding and execution.
“If you look at it, software productivity today has already risen by about 30% to 40% to 50% today, averaged over a lifecycle of full release, product release. This could go up maybe four, five times, maybe 10 times,” Vembu said.
“My belief is that this domain-specific, vertical-specific software will take a lot of talent,” he added.
Zoho has also entered vertical SaaS with products across retail, automotive, banking and financial services, healthcare, education, real estate and restaurants. The offerings include RetailIQ, AutoDMS, a loan origination system, MedScribe, Campus, a real estate platform and Zoho POS.
The company said 4 of these products were co-created with existing customers. Zoho’s India revenue grew 47% year over year in 2025.
On India’s AI strategy, Vembu said the country should prioritise AI research and development rather than competing aggressively in large data-centre investments.
“The part that we have not invested in, and I think we should not invest in, is to chase the trillion-dollar data centre deployments,” he said.
He added that falling training costs and stronger smaller models could make AI intelligence increasingly commoditised.
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