Empathy has never been able to scale. Until now.
You probably wouldn't have expected a release announcement that has Agentic Intelligence in the title to start with "Empathy." While the market has focused on using jargon and buzzwords to brand their products, as usual, we're focused on what matters to you, our customers, as well as your customers: a seamless engagement experience that provides what you ask for.
In this release, we've cracked one of the oldest challenges the industry has been trying to solve since the dawn of automation: Scaling empathy.
Bots have historically been cold and performative and are used by businesses to create an illusion of assistance. While the customer-facing teams scramble their resources to get answers for their customers, the bot held the door open with a generic "How can I help you?". LLMs have changed this perspective and practice, as well as customers' expectations. Now, in addition to immediacy, your customers also expect contextual awareness and accurate answers with meaningful follow-ups.
SalesIQ's Summer '26 release is built around this single conviction: Every feature, from AI bots to WhatsApp and Video calls, should help your customers feel heard or seen (pun intended). Here's how we've woven empathy for our customers into every layer of the product.
Summer '26 highlights
We felt your pain: Now train our AI bot the way your business actually works
Before we talk about what the bot does for your customers, let's talk about what we've done for you.
We know the pain of writing hundreds of FAQ articles, manually maintaining a knowledge base, and stitching together training data so a bot can give half-decent answers. We built this release to take that burden off your plate entirely.
Paste a web URL. That's it. Your Answer Bot learns directly from your existing website content. It cuts down the manual process involved in training a bot to almost zero since you already have all the information on your website.
You can auto-translate your knowledge base into your prospects' preferred languages, so empathy isn't limited by the language your team writes in.
And when customer queries go beyond what your knowledge base covers, you can now enable the AI bot to answer questions related to your broader industry, not just your documentation.
Traditional FAQs and articles have been upgraded with our AI-powered self-help, where visitors can now just type their question directly into the chat widget and get a precise, conversational answer.
What does this mean for your business? Now you don't spend weeks waiting to allocate dedicated resources or working on content backlogs. In minutes, you can set up and see SalesIQ's AI bot in action.
Anthropic, Google AI, DeepSeek, and more: Bring your own AI
While all of the above functionalities are powered by our in-house Zia AI, we don't restrict you if you prefer another custom AI service. In addition to a native OpenAI integration, we now support direct integrations with Anthropic, Google AI, and DeepSeek. You can also connect SalesIQ to any third-party AI provider—Perplexity, Grok, or any other LLM provider, including a self-hosted one.
When the bot can't resolve it, empathy means intelligently stepping aside
Instead of leaving your customers hanging or routing them through various touchpoints that irritate them, our AI-powered Criteria Router performs real-time sentiment, intent, and topic analysis and intelligently routes them to the person best equipped to help and resolve their queries.
What does this mean for your customers?If the bot can't help, your customers aren't abandoned or bounced between departments repeating the same problem. By understanding the sentiment, intent, and topic, they're routed to someone who already has the context and can immediately take action, making your customers feel like the business actually cares enough to get it right the first time.
Enter Agentic Intelligence: Zia Agents
This release marks SalesIQ's entry into the world of Agentic AI, introducing Zia Agents, our proprietary AI agents that go beyond just answering questions. They work as operators inside SalesIQ, autonomously picking up chats and resolving customer queries, and only loop in a human when truly needed.
To do this well, Zia Agents can pull context from records, webhooks, file uploads, and databases, including data from Zoho apps and third-party sources, to give accurate, informed responses. And this is just the beginning. We'll keep expanding what Zia Agents can do, well beyond answering questions and resolutions.
We've added more capabilities and functionalities to our Zia Agents and AI bot. See the full list of features.
Empathy for your teams too: Upgrade in our codeless platforms
Empathy isn't just customer-facing. This release focuses on removing the friction your team faces as well.
Our Workflow builder is now codeless. Workflow previews lets you see how it works before deployment, and you also have complete access to a post creation log history to understand exactly what happened and when.
Zobot upgrades
Logs are extended to Zobot, our codeless bot builder, where you get to see the complete bot execution flow and get a granular view on how the bot has been performing so you can pinpoint where things went right or wrong. Auto-translation is extended to Zobot as well. Now you can build a bot in your primary language and deploy it across every language your customers speak.
Bots can now forward chats to operators via calls, helping businesses route customers to the right resolution path faster.
What does this mean for your teams? Build, preview, and iterate workflows without writing a single line of code or waiting on a developer.
Empathetic outreach: WhatsApp without the walls
WhatsApp is where customer conversations are moving. But until now, SalesIQ's WhatsApp capabilities came with limits: You needed separate numbers across Zoho products, you cannot reach out to those who haven't visited your website, and templates were monolingual. That's not how empathetic outreach works. Not anymore.
You can now initiate a conversation with anyone on WhatsApp by entering their number directly. Also, you can now integrate the same WhatsApp number across all your Zoho products, and WhatsApp templates are multilingual. Template messages can also be triggered from Zobot via the Channel Message card.
And because sending messages into the void isn't a strategy, we're shipping Outbound broadcast reports. Every campaign tracked with delivery status, open rate, response rate, and conversation outcomes. You're not guessing what works. You're measuring it and improving it every cycle.
What does this mean for your marketing team? No more rewriting the same campaign in five languages. One WhatsApp number, powered by one platform, sending multilingual templates, so your team spends time on the conversion, not the setup.
See what else is new with WhatsApp.
Empathy doesn't encourage silos: Integrations that connect your stack
Within the Zoho ecosystem: SalesIQ's integration capabilities expand with the likes of Projects, Survey, and Cliq to bring unification to the tools your teams already use.
Third-party integrations: DeepL Translate gives higher-accuracy translation for operator chat conversations.
SalesIQ's native integration with Zoho CRM and Zoho Desk provides thoughtful enhancements like syncing conversation summaries and tags, so everyone's aware of the context without asking customers to repeat themselves. Zoho Bookings integration now supports payments, group bookings, and custom fields.
What does this mean for your business? Your sales, support, marketing, and development teams see the same conversation history without toggling between tabs or chasing updates on multiple platforms. More importantly, your customer never has to explain their problem twice.
See how these integrations can help you and what else is new.
Face-to-Face empathy: Native video calls and meeting scheduler
Sometimes empathy requires more than text, screenshare, audio call, or even remote assist. For businesses where seeing your customer makes the difference, video calling is now a native capability in SalesIQ. Also they can now schedule follow-up meetings directly from an active chat or create meetings independently outside of a conversation when needed.
What else? Check the release features.
Closing the empathy equation
Every feature in this release was built with one question in mind: does this make the customer feel heard and make their job easier? Get hands-on with the features and you'll see the answer for yourself.
With respect to Agentic Intelligence, this is just the beginning.
Welcome to the era of SalesIQ's Agentic Intelligence. Welcome to Summer '26 release.
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