Two New Apps Just Landed in Zoho One: Tables and Publish

Posted on September 12, 2026October 12, 2026 by Prudence Tshutshani

Two New Apps Just Landed in Zoho One: Tables and Publish

If your business runs on Zoho One, open your app list. In September 2026 Zoho quietly added two new apps to it: Zoho Tables, for organising work and data, and Zoho Publish, for managing how your business shows up on Google. Neither has had much coverage yet, and both solve problems we see in almost every discovery call.

Here is what each one does, where it fits, and what to check before you roll it out to your team.

Zoho Tables: the structure your spreadsheets are missing

Zoho describes Tables as a no-code mix of spreadsheet and database. You get the familiar rows and columns, plus the ability to link data across tables so that, for example, every task points back to the campaign it belongs to. The same live data can be shown as a Grid, Kanban board, Calendar, Gallery, Gantt chart or Form, so each person sees it the way they work.

What stands out

AI-assisted setup. Describe what you need, such as “a base to manage marketing events with tables for event details, tasks, budget, vendors and attendees”, and Zoho’s Zia suggests use cases, then builds the tables, fields and relationships for you to refine. It is a quick way to get past the blank page.
Simple automation. Trigger-and-action rules without code, such as notifying a Cliq channel when a high-priority record is added.
Easy to bring data in. Zoho lists imports from Google Drive, WorkDrive, Cliq, CRM, Dropbox, Flow and Zapier, and added Smartsheet and CRM imports earlier this year.
Templates. Ready-made starting points for marketing, finance, HR, sales, operations and events.

Where Tables fits, and where it does not

Tables is for the in-between work: the content calendar, the vendor tracker, the onboarding checklist, the event plan. These usually live in a spreadsheet that one person built and one person understands. Moving them into Tables gives them owners, views and automation without needing a full custom app.

It is not a place to rebuild your customer records or your books. Customers belong in Zoho CRM and financials belong in Zoho Books. The goal is one connected system, not another silo.

Zoho Publish: your local presence, in one place

For any business that customers find through Google Search and Maps, the Google Business Profile is a front door. Publish is Zoho’s tool for managing those profiles, and for businesses with several locations, managing all of them from one dashboard instead of a dozen logins.

What stands out

Profile details in one place. Update hours, photos, services and descriptions, and keep branding consistent across locations.
Reviews without the chase. A central view of reviews, automated replies to common review types, and AI-drafted replies matched to your brand voice. Negative reviews can be routed to the right team member automatically, and reviews can become tickets in Zoho Desk.
Insights and reporting. Charts for sentiment, rating trends and response times, plus scheduled reports for your team. Recent additions include a Leaderboard that ranks locations on review handling, Review Keywords that surface what customers praise or complain about most, and a Store Locator Widget for your website.
Control over who does what. Role-based permissions let you hand specific tasks to specific people, and there is an Android app for replying on the go.

Our view on local visibility is simple. Accurate information and prompt, human replies to reviews do more for you than any trick, and Publish makes that routine easier to keep up.

Before you switch them on

Check what your edition includes. Zoho says Tables is included in Zoho One at no extra cost, with Zoho One customers getting the Professional plan. Publish is listed among the Marketing apps. Limits, such as the number of locations or users, are not published on Zoho’s plan page, so confirm them for your account.
Check your data centre. One industry source reports Tables is not yet available in the EU data centre. Confirm availability for your region before you plan around it.
Keep a person in the loop. Review AI-drafted replies, especially to negative reviews, before they go out. Use the permissions to decide who can post for the business.
Avoid building a new silo. Decide up front what belongs in Tables and what belongs in CRM, Books or Projects.

How we would start

Pick one spreadsheet. Choose the one that causes the most Monday-morning confusion and move it into Tables first.
Pick one location. Set up one Google Business Profile in Publish, fix the basics, and set the review reply rules before adding the rest.
Name an owner for each. Someone should be responsible for the table and for the profile, so nothing depends on one person’s memory.
Show the team. A short walkthrough, and a person to ask when someone cannot find where to click. That is the part most rollouts skip.

Want help getting more out of your Zoho One?

Many of our clients already own more of Zoho One than they use. We will look at how your team works today, tell you honestly which apps are worth switching on, and set them up so your team actually uses them. Book a free consultation at consultjc.com or email info@consultjc.com.

People first. Systems that scale.

Catalyst 3.0: Zoho’s New Platform for Building AI Agents, Not Just Apps

Posted on September 9, 2026October 9, 2026 by Prudence Tshutshani

Catalyst 3.0: Zoho’s New Platform for Building AI Agents, Not Just Apps

A question we hear more and more from growing businesses: “Can we build something custom, and can it live on Zoho’s own infrastructure?”

On September 2, 2026, Zoho gave that question a bigger answer. Catalyst 3.0, the latest version of its developer cloud platform, is positioned as an “agent-ready” full-stack cloud, built so AI coding assistants can take an app from a prompt to production without a developer stitching infrastructure together by hand. Here is what that means in plain English, what to ask before you rely on it, and when we would, and would not, point you at it.

What Catalyst is, in plain English

Catalyst is Zoho’s cloud platform for building and running custom applications: the hosting, the back end, the data, the scheduled jobs and the rest of the plumbing, all inside Zoho’s own cloud. Zoho’s argument for version 3.0 is that writing code is no longer the slow part. It says more than 72% of developers now use AI daily to write code, but provisioning, connecting and operating the cloud services behind it is still a bottleneck. Catalyst 3.0 is meant to remove that step.

“Agent-ready” means the platform is designed to be driven by AI coding assistants such as Claude Code and Codex, not just by people clicking through a console. Zoho’s Catalyst page lists support for Claude, Cursor, Antigravity, Codex and GitHub Copilot.

What’s new in 3.0

Agent Skills. Packaged knowledge that teaches an AI assistant how Catalyst works, so it generates code that fits the platform. They are listed on the Claude Code and Codex marketplaces.
MCP support. Lets a developer run Catalyst actions, such as deployment and configuration, from inside their coding assistant instead of the Catalyst console.
A non-interactive CLI. Runs tasks end to end without anyone answering prompts along the way. The Skill also decides whether each request goes through the CLI or MCP, rather than leaving that choice to the AI model.
Full-stack services. Front-end hosting, serverless functions, compute and data management, with hooks into Zoho applications. A few open-source language models are hosted on Zoho’s infrastructure for apps that need AI features.
Open-source pieces. The Skills repository, the SDK, the CLI and Slyte, a lightweight JavaScript framework, are all open source, which means your developers can inspect them.
Regional hosting. Zoho says you can host in the US or EU for compliance-sensitive apps, or in its India data centres for data sovereignty.

Governance: what Zoho says, and what to ask

“Built-in governance” is the headline claim, and for AI agents that can change live systems it is the part that matters most. Zoho says apps inherit the security layer of its cloud. Catalyst’s own page adds that agents log in with their own configurable permission set, that destructive commands are disabled in non-interactive mode, that there is an audit trail covering application, platform and MCP tool-call logs, and that changes after launch are versioned, attributable and reversible.

Those are the right ideas. One independent analyst, IBRS, was more cautious in a September 28 review. It found the announcement “stronger on promise than on proof”, with little detail on security architecture, audit specifics or compliance certifications. So before you commission anything, ask for evidence:

Does every agent action run under its own traceable identity, and can we see the logs?
Which compliance certifications apply to the region we would host in?
Which third-party MCP servers will the agents connect to, and who has vetted them?

What it costs

Pricing is pay-as-you-go, with a per-unit cost for each feature, a monthly free tier, and free credits for six months (listed as the equivalent of about ₹15,000, or $250 on Catalyst’s site). The Console shows usage and lets you set budget alerts and spending ceilings. Turn those on from day one, because AI agents can spend quickly.

When we would point you at Catalyst, and when we would not

Our approach is native first. Zoho CRM, Creator, Books, Flow and Deluge already cover most of what growing businesses need, and every line of custom code is something you have to own, maintain and explain to the next person. We try the simplest path before we complicate anything.

Catalyst starts to make sense when a real requirement sits beyond what the native tools do well. Think of a customer-facing portal with its own logic, a heavy integration, or a product feature that needs its own back end. Go in with open eyes about the trade-offs the analysts flag too: generated applications suit prototypes, dashboards and simple data apps better than complex, business-critical systems, and AI-written code builds maintenance debt from day one.

Five questions to ask before commissioning a custom build

Why can’t native Zoho do this? If you cannot answer that clearly, start there.
Who owns it in two years? If your key developer resigned tomorrow, could someone else pick it up?
Who reviews AI-written code? Speed is only a gain if someone checks what the agent produced.
Where does the data live? Pick the region deliberately and confirm it with your compliance lead.
What is the smallest pilot? Start with one small team and one non-critical application, and measure delivery time, quality and the effort spent on governance.

Thinking about a custom build on Zoho?

We will start by diagnosing what you actually need, tell you honestly whether native Zoho can do it, and, if it cannot, help you scope something simple that your team can own. Book a free consultation at consultjc.com or email info@consultjc.com.

People first. Systems that scale.

Zia Goes Agentic: What Zoho People’s New AI Means for Your HR Team

Posted on February 8, 2026October 8, 2026 by Prudence Tshutshani

Zia Goes Agentic: What Zoho People's New AI Means for Your HR Team

If you run HR for a growing company, you already know the shape of a Monday morning. A leave balance to check. A new hire still waiting on their portal invitation. A manager asking where the latest policy lives. None of it is hard. All of it adds up.

Zoho has made a meaningful move on exactly this problem. Over the past few months, Zia, the AI assistant inside Zoho People, has gone from something that answers questions to something that gets tasks done. For a mid-sized business without a large HR department, that is worth paying attention to.

From Answering Questions to Doing the Work

Most workplace chatbots stop at “here’s a link to the policy.” Zoho describes Zia as an assistant that “answers questions, executes tasks, and pulls reports” from a plain-language request, working against your own Zoho People data.

The recent updates show the direction of travel. Zia can now carry out key onboarding steps straight from chat, such as managing candidates, triggering workflows, resending portal invitations and checking onboarding records by status. Employees can ask it to find files that have been shared with them. It can even draft assessment questions for your learning courses from a topic description or an uploaded document.

That is the shift: from an assistant that points, to one that does.

What It Looks Like in a Real Week

Based on what Zoho has published, here is where a growing HR team is likely to feel it first:

Routine questions stop landing on HR. Employees can ask Zia about policies, leave and their own data instead of messaging a person, and Zoho says it can summarise policies and help with leave planning.
Onboarding moves faster. The admin steps that eat a new-hire week can be triggered from a conversation rather than hunted down across screens.
Managers see their team without asking for a report. Zia turns workforce data into charts and highlights trends and recurring patterns.
It meets people where they work. Zia works by chat or voice across the web app, the mobile app, Microsoft Teams and Slack.

Why This Matters More for Growing Businesses Than Big Ones

Enterprises have specialists for onboarding, policy and reporting. A 60-person company has one or two people doing all of it, and often one person who simply knows where everything is. When that person is out sick, or resigns, the business feels it.

An assistant that handles the routine questions and routine steps spreads that load across the system instead of across one person’s memory. That is the real value here, and it is why we think this belongs in the conversation for scaling businesses, not just large ones.

It is also within reach. Zia is listed among the features on Zoho People’s plans rather than sold as a separate enterprise product, and you can run it on Zoho’s own language model, hosted in Zoho’s data centres, or bring your own key to connect a third-party model. Which edition includes which Zia capabilities is worth confirming for your plan before you build around it, and we are happy to check that with you.

The Question to Ask First: Who Can See What?

An assistant that can act on HR data needs rules. Zoho says Zia only provides information each user is permitted to access, keeps an audit of every action it performs, and protects data with encryption. Those are the right foundations.

They only protect you if your roles and permissions are right to begin with. If everyone is an admin today, Zia will inherit that. This is the unglamorous work we do first, because we diagnose before we prescribe.

Where We Would Be Careful

Patterns are not verdicts. Insights that flag trends in attendance or engagement are a prompt for a good conversation with a manager. They are not a decision about a person.
Clean data in, useful answers out. If leave policies are out of date or employee records are patchy, Zia will faithfully repeat the mess.
Technology does not create adoption. Your new system will not fail because of the software. It fails if the team is not brought along.

How to Start Without Overcomplicating It

Fix the foundations. Review roles and permissions, and make sure your policies and employee data are current.
Start small. Pick two or three high-volume requests, such as leave questions, onboarding steps and policy lookups, and measure the time you get back.
Bring people along. Show employees and managers what to ask and where to go when something does not work. Keep a human reachable for the “where do I click” moments. That is why every Consult JC launch includes a period of free hypercare.

Thinking About Zia for Your HR Team?

We will look at your current Zoho People setup, tell you honestly what is worth switching on and what to fix first, and help your team actually use it. Book a free consultation at consultjc.com or email info@consultjc.com.

People first. Systems that scale.

Schedule a Free Consult

Tag: Zoho One