Zoho Creator gets AI boost to improve developer innovation
Onome Amuge
Zoho Corporation has launched a suite of new artificial intelligence (AI)-powered services and features within its low-code application development platform, Zoho Creator.
The centrepiece of the upgrade is CoCreator, an AI assistant that enables users to construct applications using natural language voice and written prompts, process flow diagrams, and existing business specification documents.
In a statement to Business a.m., Zoho explained that this development reflects its ongoing commitment to investing in AI capabilities that offer tangible, real-time, and secure advantages for its business user base.
Powered by Zia, Zoho’s in-house AI engine that has been integrated across its product suite since 2015, CoCreator is designed to shorten application go-to-market timelines and democratise the app creation process for users with varying levels of technical expertise. These new AI functionalities are included within the existing subscription, without the need for additional add-ons.
Zoho also noted that its complete ownership of its technology stack, coupled with the deep integration of AI, provides customers with a superior level of contextual AI across their entire workflow compared to competitors. This allows the system to gain a deeper understanding of user data and proactively anticipate its usage.
“Since we introduced Creator in 2006, our mission has been to make app development simpler and faster, without compromising on functionality,” said Kehinde Ogundare, country head, Zoho Nigeria.
“AI now takes us to the next level, shortening the time from an idea to an app. Today’s announcement significantly raises the baseline on speed of quality app creation with deep capabilities, without adding costs,” he added.
Among the newly introduced capabilities is the Idea-to-App Generation feature. This allows businesses to leverage ZohoAI or OpenAI to rapidly develop fully functional applications, complete with contextual integrations, automation workflows, permission controls, and insightful dashboards. By inputting text or voice prompts, process flow diagrams, or system documentation such as software requirement specifications (SRS), Creator can provide domain-specific suggestions, relevant field ideas, and tailored modules to meet a customer’s specific business requirements.
The Contextual Component Generation AI further enhances existing applications by offering prompt-based form generation. Zia can also proactively suggest relevant fields within forms, a functionality often lacking in other low-code development platforms. Developers of all skill levels can generate and optimise code blocks contextually within their apps using Zia’s prompter and add annotations to existing code blocks for easier future maintenance.
To further enhance business capabilities, users can now rapidly transform unstructured data from various file types and databases into custom applications, removing inconsistencies through the AI-driven data cleansing and modelling feature.
Additionally, the newly introduced AI Skills feature enables businesses to build applications with specialised AI functionalities that can interpret natural language instructions within a business context and intelligently automate complex chains of actions. This advanced feature is currently available in early access and is slated for wider release in June 2025.
Other enhancements now available include the ability to upload documents and extract relevant information directly into an application for easy querying; voice-based app generation from mobile devices; and the deployment of custom AI models for tasks such as optical character recognition (OCR), predictive analytics, and object detection.