'We have entered After DeepSeek (AD) era, Big Capital (BC) era is over', says Zoho's Sridhar Vembu

Sridhar Vembu, Cofounder and Chief Scientist Zoho

Zoho Corp’s Sridhar Vembu, who recently stepped down as CEO to become the company’s Chief Scientist, believes the AI landscape has shifted away from Big Tech dominance.

"It was assumed that Big Tech will own AI, and everyone else will pay tribute. Over $250B has been invested in AI—Microsoft alone put in $90B. But that was the BC era (Big Capex). Now, we are in AD—the After DeepSeek era," he said during the company's annual Zoho Day event on February 4 in Austin, Texas.

Responding to Moneycontrol's queries, Vembu said that the firm will be rolling out features across its products using Deepseek and other open-source LLMs.

"Deepseek has made state-of-the-art reasoning widely available to all. That has unleashed a huge wave of adoption, including at Zoho. We are rapidly rolling out features across our products that use this reasoning capability to offer exceptional user experience. We plan to apply Deepseek (and other open source LLMs) for other stages of our 3-stage roadmap as well, along with our own innovations, which we are investing in heavily," He said.

Outlining Zoho’s AI roadmap, Vembu said the company is advancing in three stages.

"The first stage is incorporating AI reasoning engines along with contextual business data to provide an extraordinary user experience for our customers. This is happening rapidly across our product suite. We have the unique ability to integrate all the business data a customer has with us across our applications and then drive insights using AI," he explained.

The second stage, he said, involves the development of agentic systems, where AI not only generates insights but also takes actions. "The AI outputs 'actions,' and we are investing in making sure those actions are 'machine verifiable.' That is where our key innovation comes from," Vembu added.

Vembu predicts that AI will bring exponential productivity gains for programmers, particularly in UI development and low-code/no-code platforms. "There will be 10X to 100X productivity gains for programmers using AI," he said, adding, "We want the LLMs today for a chain of thought (CoT) reasoning and not memorizing our data...We also need output engineering,".

His remarks come just days after Vembu, the co-founder of Zoho Corp announced that he will be stepping down as the company's CEO to take on the role of Chief Scientist. In his new position, Vembu aims to focus on deep tech research and innovation, particularly in artificial intelligence and its applications.

During the Zoho Day event, he said that this transition will help Zoho to expand its AI-driven offerings, leveraging advancements in automation and software development.