Sachin Agrawal

As AI continues to take the business world by storm, regulations are something that companies will start to become more familiar with.

Zoho is one example of a company that is looking to develop AI technology in an ethical way to keep people’s data safe. Technology Magazine caught up with Sachin Agrawal, Managing Director at Zoho UK, about the company’s plans moving forward.

Having worked across several major IT companies, including IBM, Sachin formed his own software-as-a-service (SaaS) company before joining Zoho within the UK. Here, he speaks about the importance of developing responsible AI and how Zoho is positioning itself to protect valuable customer data in a world of increasing digital regulations.

Please tell us about yourself and your career path towards Zoho. What first got you interested in AI?

My career started in management consulting with the Tata Group in 1996, helping companies with their market entry, expansion and growth strategies, but with the IT industry booming in 1999, I made the jump to join one of the major Indian IT companies Tech Mahindra, working in India and the US and witnessing the .com boom and bust at close quarters.

I have enjoyed the same entrepreneurial energy and environment at Zoho, heading up operations in the UK, which is the third largest market for the company behind the US and India.

While I was familiar with AI from my time in the tech industry, it’s at Zoho that I’ve been closest to it, where we’ve been developing and embedding AI capabilities into our products for many years. As a consultant and a business leader, I saw how technology was a key enabler in driving automation and efficiency to business processes and with the power of AI unfolding, I was excited about the level of impact growing multifold.

How is Zoho currently utilising AI?

Zoho has been developing our use of AI for over a decade, in-house, and we are applying it within tools to create better solutions for customers. 

We have embedded AI throughout our product suite. For example, using it to intelligently recognise receipt data when using Zoho Expense, or to spell and grammar check content in apps such as Zoho Writer or Mail. It is helping to give insights to sales teams as to the best time to call customers for success too, for example, and of course in our BI and Analytics app giving context to business data, flagging anomalies and suggesting actions to take. 

At Zoho, we run on Zoho, so we experience all of the benefits first-hand before we launch to customers. AI now plays a central part in how we work day-to-day, as it does for many of our customers.

We are now working on several AI developments, including language models that are more contextual and tailored to business use to enable more robust decision-making through delivering better, more relevant insights and suggested actions.

How do you see AI regulations impacting Zoho as a business?

AI clearly has an important role to play. However, AI regulations for businesses have not yet been introduced. We hope to see more guidance around how regulations will be deployed to understand the impact this will have and are prepared to adapt to maximise AI’s benefits in a safe and trustworthy manner.

Zoho has been a longstanding advocate of safe and trustworthy AI. Sure, AI innovation and adoption should be done carefully. But at the same time, the role it can play in giving businesses a competitive edge should be recognised. A balance is needed to allow businesses to benefit and increase their success. 

Privacy has always been a longstanding commitment from Zoho to our customers, and it is no different with AI. Customers are given a choice in how they want to use their data when it comes to using new aspects such as OpenAI links within Zoho products. They need to opt in for this, rather than opt out, so it is not something which is automatically made available. 

We welcome the ongoing discussions and hope to continue to see collaboration between government, business, industry experts and academics to help guide the best way forward. From our own research (via Censuswide), 46% of UK respondents called for increased regulation from the government to protect businesses from the threat of AI. Similarly, 39% of respondents wanted more regulation to ensure AI’s safe development, a common concern raised throughout the AI Safety Summit last year. 

How does Zoho ensure that its customer data is collected and stored in an ethical way?

Zoho was built with ‘privacy by design’. This means we take a more principle-led and moral standpoint to our approach towards data management and privacy. We hold a high-standard approach to managing data and analytics to ensure our data collection and storage are ethical and customer privacy is safeguarded. We have transparent data and privacy policies made easy for customers to understand and we only hold customer data for the period stated as per GDPR guidelines.

We are living in a digital world which produces such a huge amount of data. The volume is impossible to organise efficiently – too much for humans alone to manage and analyse. Today’s data management does not have to be something which is just the responsibility of a team of data scientists. AI-enabled software exists to enable businesses to easily access and draw insights from vast data sets. Organisations should make use of tools available on the market to help cleanse, collate and analyse their data to get the maximum value from the data they collect.

Why do you think it is important for customers to have control over their data? 

It is simply the right thing to do. At Zoho, we believe customer data belongs to them and them alone. We believe the only way to develop customer trust and to treat customers well is to safeguard their data. This means only using it for the stated and primary purpose of improving their experience in using our services. We only use customer data to help assess how products are being used for us to see what adaptations are necessary for us to deliver the best products and solutions that align with their needs. We are firm in our stance to never monetise data - it is not ours to make money from. 

How is Zoho currently approaching digital transformation, in the midst of changing AI and data regulations? What are the company’s current priorities?

Zoho holds a customer-centric approach to technology development, that is, to improve our products continuously through significant reinvestment into product development, and this will remain the focus of our digital transformation. At the same time, being a sustainable partner for our customers long-term is a firm priority, which is represented in our ‘value pricing’ strategy. We do not want to become costly inputs for our customers. 

Zoho has adapted many times with success to meet new market demands using real-time and extensive insights to seize opportunities presented by technological breakthroughs. However, for technology such as AI to be adopted successfully while following evolving regulations, businesses need to adopt it and adapt alongside it with customer trust in mind to deliver benefits like automation, forecasting, or improved customer service. 

Our current priorities are to continue to deliver an excellent customer experience in our efforts to help businesses digitally transform. We do this through the innovative product suite we offer and the support available from us and within our wider ecosystem, all with the focus on enabling businesses to be more efficient, drive growth and to deliver well against their objectives. 

Looking forward, which direction do you see the future of AI and data moving? 

AI and data are set to continue to advance along several intertwined paths, each influencing and shaping the other. We have seen AI already automate simple and basic tasks which could impact the industry. For example, it could mean that the ‘low hanging fruit’ of software development could be done by AI and only the highly sophisticated software is human-generated. If this were to be true, over 50% of software in the next generation could be AI-generated by our estimation. This could unleash a wave of possibilities, potentially bringing down the cost of software – it could be the ‘industrial revolution’ moment for the software industry. 

AI and data will become more critical to use to drive business success, especially as the amount of generated data continues to grow exponentially. This means it is impossible for humans to process and make sense of it, so automated insights and suggested actions delivered contextually to a business will be necessary to remain agile. In time, just like with most new technology, it may not be billed as AI, but will simply be part of any modern business software.

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