Zoho CRM's Models feature enables you to leverage the power of LLMs and the generative AI capabilities to accelerate productivity and streamline tasks. It provides context-aware suggestions and assistance like summaries, or help in creating content, ultimately adding to streamline day-to-day work flows and decision-making.

What can you do with Models?

Everyday CRM work demands context, clarity, and speed. But sales reps often lose time finding, processing, or rewriting information scattered across records and communications. Models bridges the gap between everyday CRM work and intelligent automation. It’s designed to help you act faster, stay informed, and communicate with clarity—right inside your CRM, without switching context.

A sales rep, for example, often spends time catching up on old conversations, scrolling through notes, or rewriting follow-up emails. Managers face the same challenge when reviewing deals or understanding customer progress. 

1. Context buried in data: Every record holds multiple fields, related lists, and updates. Users have to move through several sections to get the full picture before taking action.
2. Information spread across channels: Conversations happen through calls, emails, meetings, and notes—making it hard to recall what was last discussed or decided.
3. Repetitive writing tasks: Drafting follow-up emails, documenting meeting outcomes, or creating notes often involves rewriting similar content with minor variations.
4. Inconsistent communication: When multiple team members collaborate on a customer record, tone and context can vary, affecting customer experience.
5. Time lost in preparation: Managers and sales reps spend minutes reading through detailed records before reviews, calls, or hand-offs instead of focusing on next steps.
   

Models simplifies all of that.

Here’s how it helps across different tasks:

1. Use Conversation Summary to see concise recaps of recent interactions such as calls, meetings, notes, and emails. This eliminates the need to manually piece together customer history before a call or review.
2. Access Record Summary and Note Summary to extract the most relevant information from detailed records and long notes, perfect for quick decision-making.
3. Draft or rephrase emails and notes using AI assistance that adapts to your tone and purpose.
4. When designing marketing or communication templates, get suggestions for subject lines, tone, and structure through Template Assistant.
   

How does it work?

Models integrates the power of Zia and your choice of LLM source to deliver contextual, relevant, and actionable suggestions. From understanding your business data to generating precise responses, these AI models collaborate seamlessly, despite their distinct capabilities.

What're the supported language models?

With Models, you get the leverage to choose the model of your preference, suiting your business the best, and get in-product assistance. You can choose the model from the following options:

1. Zia (Zoho's native AI model)
2. ChatGPT
3. Gemini
4. Anthropic
5. Cohere
6. Deepseek
7. SiliconFlow
   

Availability

1. OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Cohere: All data centers except CN.
2. Zoho Hosted LLM: All data centers.
3. Deepseek, SiliconFlow: CN data center.
4. Edition support: Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate
5. Language support: All Languages

Permission Required

1. Only Administrators can enable/disable Models for an organization.
2. Users with Summary permission enabled in their profile can access the summary features within a record: Record Summary, Conversation Summary, Note Summary.
   
   

Check Feature Availability and Limits

Data processing

Zia: As Zoho's native AI model, Zia operates entirely within Zoho's secure infrastructure. It processes your CRM data, learns from your business workflows, and provides insights that are personalized to your organization.

ChatGPT: Developed by OpenAI, ChatGPT uses external training data (up to 2021) to generate human-like responses. It is best suited for tasks requiring a broader understanding of language and concepts outside your CRM data.

Google: Developed by Google, Gemini uses extensive training data to deliver multimodal AI capabilities. It can access and process integrated customer data for personalized features in Google services but relies on general external knowledge rather than your specific CRM workflows. 

Anthropic: Developed by Anthropic, Claude uses a mix of public and non-public training data with a focus on safety and ethics. It may retain and use user interactions for model improvement unless opted out, making it suitable for helpful general language tasks beyond your organization's CRM data.

Cohere: Developed by Cohere, this enterprise-focused AI uses secure data processing with robust privacy controls, avoiding storage of end-user personal information. It draws from broad training data without a fixed public cut-off, ideal for business applications that integrate external knowledge outside your CRM-specific insights.

DeepSeek: Developed by DeepSeek AI, this open-source model uses training data, cost-effective responses. It collects data with standard privacy practices and emphasizes clarity, best for general queries and tasks not directly personalized to your CRM or business workflows.

SiliconFlow: Provided by SiliconFlow, this AI platform supports various models trained on diverse multilingual datasets. It focuses on efficient inference and privacy assessments for data sources, suited for mobile or general applications beyond your CRM data.

Learning and pattern recognition

Zia’s advanced machine learning capabilities ensure that the model's suggestions are context-aware. By analyzing CRM data, recognizing patterns, and predicting user needs, Zia ensures the suggestions are precise and timely. The chosen AI engine—Zoho Hosted LLM, OpenAI or any other service—then processes these suggestions to generate relevant and actionable responses.

This collaboration allows the models to streamline your workflows, improve decision-making, and enhance overall productivity.

Business Scenarios

Prompts appear in most places in your CRM and based on their location, the prompts vary. This will enable you to derive a wide range of insights about your record.

The following are some scenarios where Models will benefit your business:

1. Customer correspondence: You rely on emails for a major part of your correspondence. This is where you exchange requirements and offerings, and it's what you use to send signed agreements with your customers. In all those communications, you need to stay on point with your vocabulary and be concise in your message. This is where you can use Models. As you compose an email, you can choose to rephrase your sentences, explore a product/ feature mentioned in the email thread, enhance your vocabulary, or seek more conversational assistance.
2. Productivity management: Storing vital, useful, and preferential information as notes is an effective productivity hack. It acts as a reference point to discuss further requirements and process business offerings—which is why it's it's important to make sure those notes are extra clear. Models can help you extract data points from your on-the-go notes as points so that you can look at the deconstructed takeaways. You can also rephrase or ask the model to summarize.
3. Campaign assistance: To attract and nurture quality leads, you need powerful and effective marketing messaging that is smart and relevant to the campaign. Using Models, you can draft email templates with the desired writing style and text length. You can determine if you'd like for your message to sound professional, casual, humorous, descriptive, narrative, or sarcastic, as well as whether you'd like the length of your text to be short, long, or medium.
   

Working with Models

Models is built into Zoho CRM’s interface through different assistants that appear across your record pages and editors. The main way you’ll interact with it is through the Record Assistant, which is available inside record pages, notes, and email composers.

You can access Models feature in your Zoho CRM account as different AI Assistant on the following places.

Record Assistant 

The Record Assistant acts as your in-record AI companion. It’s available at specific locations depending on the model you’ve enabled. 

Note: 

1. The Record Assistant button on the top of a record page—beside Send Email or custom buttons—appears only when the Zia model is enabled. For other models such as OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, etc., Models is accessible within the note editor and email composer.
   

Once opened, the Record Assistant gives you several options. These include different types of summaries and drafting tools designed to save time and improve accuracy.

Record Summary

Sales teams often work with records that contain layers of information—activities, related lists, notes, timelines, and more. Navigating through each section to get a clear picture can be tedious, especially when time-sensitive decisions need to be made.

This is where the Record Summary comes into the picture. It's designed to bring all essential information for a record into one centralized view, giving users a quick and comprehensive snapshot without having to navigate through multiple sections. By reducing the need for extra clicks and constant page navigation, it makes handling records faster and more efficient. With key data points presented in a clear and organized layout, it also supports smarter decision-making, helping users act with confidence and accuracy.

Read more about Record Summary

Conversation Summary 

Conversation Summary gives you a quick recap of all interactions tied to a record—whether it’s a lead, contact, or a deal—so you can see the essence of every conversation in one place. 

Zia processes multiple interaction types to generate the summary:

1. Emails: Captures the essence of recent exchanges with the record.
2. Calls: Uses available call information such as remarks, duration, or outcome. If Call Transcription is enabled in your organization, Zia also analyzes the transcription along with the call’s field data to provide a richer and more accurate summary.
3. Meetings: Draws details from meeting agendas, notes, and outcomes.
4. Notes: Includes only conversation-related notes, so that the summary stays focused on customer interactions rather than every note on the record.
   

Notes: 

1. Zia currently considers the last 10 entries each from emails, calls, meetings, and notes to generate the summary. This ensures that the summary remains concise and contextually relevant.
   

Notes Summary

Notes are where users capture on-the-go information—customer inputs, internal discussions, or follow-up reminders. But reviewing them, especially when there are dozens linked to a record, can take time. Note Summary condenses this scattered information into an easy-to-read overview.

It highlights the core ideas, decisions, and updates recorded in your notes, helping you recall past discussions instantly without scrolling through long text entries.

Zia processes your record’s notes and presents two views:

1. Overall Summary: A comprehensive recap of all notes linked to the record, ideal when you want to understand the full history of interactions or key takeaways.
   
   
2. Last Note Summary: Focuses only on the most recent note, giving you a quick refresh before an upcoming call or meeting.
   

Read more about Note Summary

Overall Emails Summary

Emails Summary provides a concise overview of all past email exchanges of each record in CRM, helping you grasp the record's history quickly and make informed decisions moving forward.

How to use Emails Summary

1. Launch the Zia Record Assistant.
2. You will see Emails Summary along with Conversation Summary and Record Summary. You can also choose it from the menu.

You will receive a summary of the email conversations of the record.

What does the email summary comprise?

The emails summary not only includes what's in the emails, but also the customer sentiments and underlying intents across interactions, response delays, missed follow-ups or commitments.

Note: The Emails Summary summarizes the last 50 emails of a record, including all related threads.

Draft Note and Draft Email

Writing notes and emails is one of the most frequent tasks in CRM, yet it often takes longer than it should. Whether it’s summarizing a meeting, capturing a quick update, or drafting a customer response, users spend valuable time thinking about wording and tone. the model helps streamline this process.

When you add a new note or compose an email, Models can generate, rephrase, or summarize your content based on the context you provide. This allows you to maintain consistency in communication while reducing the effort needed to start from scratch.

Here’s how it works:

1. Zia understands your record data—like contact names, deal stage, or related activities—and uses that information to produce relevant and accurate text suggestions.
2. External models such as OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, or Cohere focus on improving the tone, clarity, or structure of your message based on the input you provide in the editor.
3. You can adjust the text for tone (formal, casual, concise, persuasive, etc.) or length, depending on the situation.
   

Template Assistant

When you’re creating or editing an email template, the Template Assistant can help you build subject lines and message content suited to your audience and purpose. You can specify tone, style, or length, and Models will generate matching suggestions. The Template Assistant is available across all supported models. 

Models is available for both Standard and Canvas view of the record detail pages.

1. Go to Setup (⚙) > Zia > Models.
   
2. In the Model Configuration page, enable the toggle button for the preferred model.
   
1. For Zoho Hosted LLM, on the deployment confirmation pop-up, click Yes, Deploy.
   
   
   
   
2. For other models, first click Configure, and then acknowledge the terms by clicking Proceed.
   
   
3. Add the API Key and click Save.