Key Takeaways
The Core Problem: The average Zoho One customer uses 22-23 applications, creating constant context-switching that drains productivity. Zoho’s latest update eliminates boundaries between apps rather than adding more disconnected features.
Spaces Reorganization: Instead of navigating 50+ apps by name, Zoho organizes everything around how people actually work—Personal, Organizational, and function-specific spaces (Sales, Marketing, Finance, HR) that can include third-party apps with seamless integration.
Boards for Context-First Work: Users get unified views of tasks, approvals, and actions across multiple applications in one place. The system brings relevant tools to you based on what you’re trying to accomplish, rather than forcing you to hunt through separate apps.
Integration Visibility and Automation: A unified integration panel gives administrators complete visibility into all active connections across the system, while outcome-based integrations like Smart Offboarding automate complex multi-system workflows through a single interface.
Embedded AI Intelligence: Zia, Zoho’s AI assistant, is contextually woven throughout the platform—not a separate feature. It can answer questions by pulling from across all 50+ applications, turning unified data into practical intelligence that actually helps you work.
Unmatched Value Proposition: All of this complexity-reducing innovation is delivered at the same $37 per user per month price point, positioning Zoho as a platform that reduces both operational chaos and software costs.
I’ve been watching the business software space evolve for the last decade, and I have to say — what Zoho just announced with its Zoho One update is exactly the kind of thinking we need more of in this industry. While everyone else is busy fragmenting the workplace with disconnected point solutions and AI features bolted on as afterthoughts, Zoho is doing something fundamentally different: removing the boundaries between applications entirely.
The Problem Zoho Is Solving
Let me start with why this matters. The average Zoho One customer uses 22-23 applications. Think about that for a moment. Now think about how you work every day — jumping between Slack, your CRM, your project management tool, your email, your analytics dashboard. Each switch costs time, breaks context, and fragments your thinking. We’ve normalized this chaos, but it’s a massive productivity drain.
Zoho’s update tackles this head-on with what they’re calling a unified experience across experience, integrations, and intelligence. And honestly? It’s about time someone did this properly.
Spaces: Making Navigation Actually Make Sense
The first major change is how Zoho One organizes applications through “Spaces.” Instead of making you remember which of 50+ apps does what, they’ve organized everything around how people actually work.
There’s a Personal Space for your individual productivity tools, an Organizational Space for company-wide communication, and function-specific spaces for departments like Sales, Marketing, Finance, and HR. You can customize these spaces, and here’s the kicker — you can bring third-party applications into them too. They behave like first-party Zoho apps thanks to single sign-on integration.
This seemingly simple reorganization removes a cognitive burden most of us likely don’t even realize we carry. Context becomes king, and the interface adapts to how I’m working rather than forcing me to adapt to how someone designed their app menu.
Boards: Context Over Applications
Zoho’s “Boards” concept takes this unification further. The idea is simple but powerful: instead of making you go to applications, applications come to you based on what you’re trying to accomplish.
Want to see all your tasks? You get a unified view of personal tasks, group tasks, and tasks from Projects and Sprints — all in one place. Need to review approvals? The Action Panel aggregates invoice approvals from accounting, deal approvals from CRM, document signatures from Zoho Sign, and travel expense approvals in a single view.
This is how software should work. I don’t care which application generated the task or approval request. I care about getting my work done efficiently.
Unified Integrations: Finally, Visibility into the Chaos
The integrations update deserves special attention because this is where most businesses struggle silently. You have Zoho-to-Zoho integrations, Zoho-to-third-party integrations, and third-party-to-third-party integrations. Keeping track of what’s connected to what is nearly impossible for most IT administrators.
Zoho One now provides a unified integration panel showing all active integrations across the entire system. Administrators can see exactly what’s connected, enable new integrations from a central location, and get recommendations for integrations they might need. This transparency is invaluable — you can’t secure or optimize what you can’t see.
They’re also introducing what they call “outcome-based integrations,” like the Smart Offboarding tool. Instead of making you touch ten different systems to offboard an employee — transferring files, wiping devices, reassigning reports, forwarding email — you follow one wizard and Zoho handles all the backend orchestration. This is integration design that respects the user’s time and mental bandwidth.
Intelligence That Actually Understands Context
Then there’s Zia, Zoho’s AI assistant, which is now woven throughout the entire Zoho One experience. But here’s what I appreciate: they’re not making AI a separate “feature” you have to think about using. It’s embedded contextually.
Zia Hubs, now a first-class application within Zoho One, automatically organizes signed contracts from Zoho Sign and recorded meetings into searchable hubs. You can ask questions like “What are my healthcare benefits?” and Zia surfaces the answer from the relevant HR documents. The intelligence works because the data is unified and the system understands context across all 50+ applications.
This is the difference between AI features and AI that’s actually useful. When your AI assistant can pull data from your HR system, your ticketing system, and your CRM to answer “How much time are our employees spending with this particular account?” — that’s intelligence that adds real value.
The Bottom Line
As Raju Vegesna, Zoho’s Chief Evangelist, said in this week’s announcement: “Customers are not licensing apps with Zoho One. They are licensing peace of mind.” I had the opportunity to sit down with Rajurecently, and we talked about Zoho’s vertically integrated approach and how controlling the full stack delivers better value for customers.
That resonates. We’re all drowning in software, and we’re all drowning in rapidly increasing software costs. What we need are platforms that reduce complexity rather than add to it, affordably. Zoho’s update, delivered at the same $37 per user per month price point, shows they understand this fundamentally.
This article was originally published on LinkedIn.
Read more of my coverage:
From Grammarly to Superhuman: Reimagining AI for the Future of Work