SaaS firms may not be able to price AI capabilities at a large premium, says Sridhar Vembu
Technology companies may no longer be able to price Artificial Intelligence (AI) features at a large premium given the recent developments in the world of AI, Sridhar Vembu, the co-founder and Chief Scientist, Zoho Corporation, said on Tuesday.
“I doubt that companies will be able to charge a large premium or even any premium at all for AI agentic technology,” Vembu said while delivering his opening keynote at Zoho’s analyst summit, Zoho Day 2025 in Austin, Texas.
Drawing a distinction between what he calls the BC (Big Capex) era and AD (After DeepSeek) eras of AI, Vembu said, “before DeepSeek it was assumed that customers will fork over huge dollars for AI and that big tech will own AI. But almost all of that vanished over one weekend.. DeepSeek showed us that reasoning is a commodity available to all.”
Zoho views Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a tool to enhance user experience using “contextual business data” and we believe that it can bring “massive programmer productivity,” the tech entrepreneur added.
He also sounded a note of caution that programmers stand the risk of becoming the next weavers or farmers.”There will soon be a time of 10X to 100X productivity gains for programmers using AI,” he said, and wondered if that will hand the programmers community the same fate as traditional weavers faced, when the textile industry productivity zoomed.
Zoho Day 2025 saw the SaaS firm announce the expansion of its AI tool Zia with the launch of Zia Agents, Agent Studio, and Agent Marketplace. “Beginning today, Zoho and ManageEngine will be previewing pre-built, task-specific Zia Agents, which will be deployed across Zoho Corporation’s combined portfolio of 100+ products in the coming weeks,” Zoho said in a statement.
Launched in 2015, Zia is Zoho’s foundational AI facilitating intelligent and contextual actions across the company’s repository of business apps. The pre-built Zia Agents set to be rolled out in the coming months include an Account Manager Agent, SDR Agent, HR Agent, Customer Support Agent, IT Help Desk Agent, and others. For customers, partners, and developers looking to create their own agents, Zoho is also launching Zia Agent Studio, which can then be distributed through Zoho’s Agent Marketplace.
Zoho Corporation said it has onboarded 110,000 new customers globally in 2024. With a total of 850,000 customers globally using a range of tools across Zoho and ManageEngine, Zoho Corporation’s AI solutions are a result of a vast range of functional data, and the company counts this as a core differentiator for the company.
Earlier this month, Vembu stepped down as CEO and took on the role of chief scientist, responsible for deep R&D initiatives at the SaaS firm. The company’s co-founder Shailesh Kumar Davey is the new group CEO. Another co-founder Tony Thomas leads Zoho US and Mani Vembu is set to lead Zoho.com, the SaaS division.
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