Zoho has launched Zia Hubs, a new AI-powered content intelligence layer that is designed to unlock insights from unstructured business data. The new tool is designed to help enterprises derive insights from any type of file format or structure, including PDFs, call logs, audio files, emails, and meeting recordings.
A tool within Zoho WorkDrive, Zia Hubs leverages the company’s proprietary AI engine, Zia, to extract meaning, context, and actionable intelligence from a wide variety of file formats. It is designed to automatically organize and interpret content uploaded into dedicated hubs within WorkDrive.
Zia Hubs can detect relationships between documents, identify section headings, generate transcripts for multimedia files, and link content to topics. Zia can also answer questions across file formats, such as fetching key points discussed during the organization’s quarterly sales calls and citing the sources along with the timestamp in a video or paragraph in a PDF, the company said.
Users can automate the ingestion of content into hubs using Zoho Flow, the company’s integration and workflow engine. This supports not just Zoho-native files, but also documents from third-party platforms such as Docusign, RingCentral, and Zoom.
“Most unstructured data is text-based, meaning pertinent information lives within email conversations, social media posts, word processor documents, or audio and video transcripts. Zia Hubs brings a common model to company data, exposing unused information to powerful capabilities and services, including agentic AI, comprehensive analysis, and accurate, unified search,” Mani Vembu, CEO, Zoho, said in a press note.
Market need and competitive landscape
As per IDC, 80% of the business data is unstructured across customer contracts, product specs, employee handbooks, and more. With the rapid adoption of AI tools across enterprise functions, the need to make unstructured data useful is growing exponentially.
“While enterprises continue to mature in structured data management, the AI content layer — particularly in document intelligence — has leapfrogged ahead. The key challenge is not capability, but context. Tools must link insights across formats while retaining traceability,” said Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst and CEO at Greyhound Research
Acknowledging the need for such a solution, major cloud providers and software vendors have been making aggressive moves in this direction. Microsoft Copilot, using advanced AI techniques including natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning, can extract insights rapidly from both legacy documentation and modern application outputs by using a centralized unstructured data store like Azure Native Qumulo.
Similarly, Google’s Duet AI integrates generative AI across Google Workspace applications by processing prompts and the context of the open document (like Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, or Gmail) to generate text, images, or even code, drawing upon existing data. Even Box AI allows users to ask questions of content stored in Box, summarise documents, and extract data from unstructured files.
Such tools are critical because the nature of work demands a simultaneous approach to both structured and unstructured information governance. As the market for unstructured data analytics is crowded, Gogia explained that Zia Hubs offers a strategic counterpoint to content intelligence solutions from Microsoft, Google, Adobe, and Box.
“Where others emphasise platform flexibility or ecosystem openness, Zoho leans into vertical integration—owning the apps, data, AI layer, and storage. This allows tighter coupling across CRM, HR, and project apps without third-party friction,” added Gogia.
However, the effectiveness of Zoho’s solutions may be limited only to companies already using Zoho’s ecosystem. “While Zoho’s solution is compelling for its user base, it is not universally superior to offerings from Microsoft and Google, which may be more accessible for enterprises with diverse technology stacks. After all, the actual value of use cases depends on the quality of data, the sophistication of workflows, and the organization’s ability to integrate and act on AI-generated insights,” said Prabhu Ram, VP for industry research group at CMR.
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Read More from This Article: Zoho unveils Zia Hubs, its answer to Copilot and Duet AI for unstructured content intelligence
Source: News