The SaaS unicorn Zoho has diversified its offerings by launching a new sub-brand called Vani. It is an AI-powered collaboration tool that is developed specifically to facilitate and make workplace communication and planning easier. Vani specialises in delivering visual workplace collaboration as its solution to the present business requirement. Vani represents a larger initiative by Zoho to redouble its investment in artificial intelligence, after just a few years earlier introducing its indigenously developed AI platform, Zia LLM, which provides specialized agentic AI applications to multiple business scenarios. 

Vision and strategic goal of Vani

Vani is a visual toolkit with the main idea of bringing better teamwork. These tools are extensively detailed with whiteboards, flowcharts, diagrams, mind-mapping, and video-conferencing. The main advantage of Vani is that the teams can operate on the same canvas, which will remove the necessity to switch applications all the time. This integrated setting allows an easy blend of information across various sources, such as desktops, cloud drives, and Excel sheets, directly into the collaborative workflow.

The strategic vision of Vani lies in the improvement of productivity and, in particular, of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Karthikeyan Jambulingam, who is the Head of Product at Vani, emphasized the potential power of the tool, saying that a minor rise in the level of ease of collaboration would lead to the SMBs achieving extraordinary gains in productivity.

Vani is created to serve the various needs of an organization by offering a broad range of tools to all organizational departments on a single canvas. This integrated management simplifies operation by eliminating the requirement to construct separate processes or complex onboarding steps.

The new offering is supported by a new Space and Zone framework that enables various teams to work separately when needed, but still enables a smooth integration across the organization when needed. This structure ensures that departments are efficient in ideating and executing projects throughout all departments within the company.

AI integration and adopting indigenous technology solutions

One of the key features of Vani is the inclusion of Artificial Intelligence. The platform works with AI to actively guide the user to create content, build organized visual representations, and derive practical insights in specific areas of their work. The tool also offers a collection of templates and toolkits already ready to use, which span the scope of applications, such as planning, brainstorming, design diagrams, and social media creative development.

Zoho has also outlined its pricing and data privacy model for the new service. Vani has been launched all over the world and costs each user $5 every month. The Indian market prices are fixed at the very competitive rates of ₹240 per user per month.

There is also a free version that provides basic functionality and enables media uploads to a maximum of 25 MB. Zoho has highlighted that its AI-based service follows a rigid policy: it will not store customer data and will not attempt to generate ads or data monetisation, and the company commits to ensuring customer privacy.

Vani is especially well-timed, as there is a growing national concern to use indigenous technology solutions in India. This change has involved top-tier endorsement, with IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw having already expressed her endorsement of the Zoho suite of software and suggested its usage in official government applications.

Other recent successes of Zoho also reflect its determination to develop made-in-India alternatives. The messaging app, Arattai, being a soft-launched product in 2021 and recently attracting a lot of attention on the Play Store, has already amassed more than 10 lakh downloads in just one week.

Arattai is branding itself as an Indian version of chat giants around the world, with all the newest messenger features, such as text messaging, voice and video calling, stories, channels, and more. This movement will offer a great environment to launch and adopt Vani. Sridhar Vembu and Tony Thomas co-founded Zoho in 1996, and today the company provides an extensive range of over 50 integrated online applications that support sales and marketing, email and collaboration, among other functions.

Conclusion

Zoho is betting heavily on the future of the workplace with the introduction of its new AI-powered collaboration platform, Vani, and establishing its presence in the competitive SaaS market. Vani can help SMBs achieve significant productivity improvement by providing sophisticated visual collaboration solutions, a Space and Zone environment of independent and seamless teamwork, and a declaration of data privacy, at a competitive price of ₹240 in India. This release, combined with the success of its other native offerings, supports the idea of Zoho being at the forefront of AI and leading the charge in promoting the use of technology solutions that are built in the country.