Zoho Explains Its Data Privacy Design

In an interview published on November 13, 2026, Ramprakash Ramamoorthy, head of AI research at Indian business software company Zoho, said its products carry no ads, including free versions, and customer data is neither sold externally nor used to train AI. More than 1 million companies and organizations worldwide use Zoho services. Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications white paper found that companies most often worried about security risks such as leaks of internal information when using generative AI. A Kadokawa ASCII Research Laboratories survey found that 46.5% of managers had used AI tools for work without company permission.

Ramamoorthy said Zoho prioritized privacy before adopting AI, displaying no ads in its products and placing no trackers that follow visitors on its website. He said visitors could verify that zoho.com has zero trackers. Zoho also sets strict contract terms and designs its products so it does not handle data in customers’ environments or include features that could prompt data extraction.

Explaining why Zoho does not use customer data for research or AI training, Ramamoorthy said a company’s data belongs to that company. He cited an insurer using its own data to have AI predict the right time to contact customers. If Zoho trained on that data, he said, the insurer’s AI design could be exposed to competitors.

On comparisons with major U.S. technology companies and OpenAI, Ramamoorthy said personal services and enterprise accounts handle data differently, so they cannot be directly compared. He said people should not handle company information in personal accounts, and that data from consumer services is generally likely to be used for training. He also cited smartphone map searches as information that circulates and can be used to build products that generate revenue for the providers.

Ramamoorthy joined Zoho as an intern in 2011. A platform whose development began in 2012 grew into the company’s AI foundation, Zia, now embedded across products and processing billions of requests per month. Since 2023, he has led efforts to develop in-house models without relying on external large language models. In 2025, Zoho began offering the Zia LLM family with 1.3 billion, 2.6 billion and 7 billion parameters. He now leads a team of more than 120 people across four sites in India and Mexico. The interview examines Zoho’s customer-data protections and the risks of “shadow IT,” in which employees use AI tools for work without company approval. The article describes Zia’s monthly volume only as billions of requests, without giving a precise figure. The interview is an excerpt, and the page has three pages. Zoho makes business software including customer relationship management tools. Its AI development chief said privacy is the starting point for product design, while the article identifies protecting data without blocking generative AI use as a challenge for companies. It also explains Zoho’s user count, how to check for trackers, and its contractual data-handling policy. The survey figure for managers’ unauthorized AI use was 46.5%.

Zoho says it does not train on customers’ business data and points to differences between consumer and enterprise services.

In an interview published on November 13, 2026, Ramprakash Ramamoorthy, head of AI research at Indian business software company Zoho, said its products carry no ads, including free versions, and customer data is neither sold externally nor used to train AI. More than 1 million companies and organizations worldwide use Zoho services. Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications white paper found that companies most often worried about security risks such as leaks of internal information when using generative AI. A Kadokawa ASCII Research Laboratories survey found that 46.5% of managers had used AI tools for work without company permission.

Ramamoorthy said Zoho prioritized privacy before adopting AI, displaying no ads in its products and placing no trackers that follow visitors on its website. He said visitors could verify that zoho.com has zero trackers. Zoho also sets strict contract terms and designs its products so it does not handle data in customers’ environments or include features that could prompt data extraction.

Explaining why Zoho does not use customer data for research or AI training, Ramamoorthy said a company’s data belongs to that company. He cited an insurer using its own data to have AI predict the right time to contact customers. If Zoho trained on that data, he said, the insurer’s AI design could be exposed to competitors.

On comparisons with major U.S. technology companies and OpenAI, Ramamoorthy said personal services and enterprise accounts handle data differently, so they cannot be directly compared. He said people should not handle company information in personal accounts, and that data from consumer services is generally likely to be used for training. He also cited smartphone map searches as information that circulates and can be used to build products that generate revenue for the providers.

Ramamoorthy joined Zoho as an intern in 2011. A platform whose development began in 2012 grew into the company’s AI foundation, Zia, now embedded across products and processing billions of requests per month. Since 2023, he has led efforts to develop in-house models without relying on external large language models. In 2025, Zoho began offering the Zia LLM family with 1.3 billion, 2.6 billion and 7 billion parameters. He now leads a team of more than 120 people across four sites in India and Mexico. The interview examines Zoho’s customer-data protections and the risks of “shadow IT,” in which employees use AI tools for work without company approval. The article describes Zia’s monthly volume only as billions of requests, without giving a precise figure. The interview is an excerpt, and the page has three pages. Zoho makes business software including customer relationship management tools. Its AI development chief said privacy is the starting point for product design, while the article identifies protecting data without blocking generative AI use as a challenge for companies. It also explains Zoho’s user count, how to check for trackers, and its contractual data-handling policy. The survey figure for managers’ unauthorized AI use was 46.5%.

Zoho says it does not train on customers’ business data and points to differences between consumer and enterprise services.