Co-founder Sridhar Vembu has vacated his post as Zoho CEO.
Vembu will step into the Chief Scientist role, focusing fully on R&D initiatives and his “personal rural development mission.”
Announcing the move on X, Vembu cited the “recent major developments” in AI as the primary reason for his role change. He wrote:
Our co-founder, Shailesh Kumar Davey, will serve as our new group CEO. Our co-founder, Tony Thomas, will lead Zoho US. Rajesh Ganesan will lead our ManageEngine division, and Mani Vembu will lead the Zoho.com division.
“The future of our company entirely depends on how well we navigate the R&D challenge, and I am looking forward to my new assignment with energy and vigor.”
Vembu co-founded AdventNet in 1996 before renaming the company “Zoho” in 2009.
The business has since extended from its CRM heritage to become a global provider of supply chain, workspace, human capital management (HCM), and other tech solutions.
Its portfolio keeps expanding, too, with the recent launch of a payroll platform and IoT arm.
Yet, as it has grown, Zoho has maintained a single product ecosystem, allowing customers to integrate insights. It even built out its own infrastructure to support this and ensure scalability.
In doing so, Zoho can help customers manage costs and has laid the foundations for an AI strategy that pulls in enterprise context and enables cross-function workflows.
Martin Schneider, VP & Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, noted this and the company’s broader AI strengths during a recent conversation with CX Today. He said:
Their AI strategy is interesting. They’re going very multimodal, building a lot of it themselves. That… [is] helping to ensure their solutions aren’t just generic or white-labeled products slapped onto something like ChatGPT.
Now, Vembu will push this strategy forward while Davey keeps the ship on course.
Davey received quite a promotion by accepting the role, having served as Vice President of Engineering at ManageEngine, Zoho’s IT management division.
In that position, Davey is credited with playing a key part in designing and developing Zoho Creator, the low-code application platform.
Previously, the new CEO worked for Tata Communications on networking-related projects, with close IBM alignment.
Yet, now he’ll help preserve the operational underbelly at Zoho as Vembu dreams his next big dream and strives to seize the opportunity AI presents.
That’s the picture Rebecca Wetteman, CEO & Principal Analyst at Valoir, paints when commenting on the CEO change. She told CX Today:
Zoho has always had a strong leadership team and a decentralized structure that empowers employees to make decisions, so I don’t expect we’ll see a big change in the day-to-day at Zoho.
“I’d expect this move will enable Sridhar to spend less time on the day-to-day of Zoho and more on deep thinking about AI as well as his rural development initiatives that are near and dear to him,” she concluded.
Yet, whatever the future holds, expect Zoho to maintain an intuitive approach to AI, so users can leverage it almost without realizing they’re doing so.
After all, the company hasn’t wavered from that tactic, even as it has won more enterprise deals. The key focus remains on offering a simplified operating system for business.
Where agentic AI fits in will be fascinating, especially given Zoho’s recent partnership with NVIDIA, which sets the stage for the vendor to deliver customizable AI Agents.
As Vembu fans the innovation flywheel, expect that announcement to come soon and with great fanfare.