Zoho Corp., a leading global technology innovator, has introduced Zia Hubs in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, marking a significant advancement in how businesses can extract and leverage intelligence from unstructured data. This new solution, integrated within Zoho WorkDrive—a secure content collaboration platform—aims to empower organisations to unlock deep insights from diverse content types such as documents, audio, video, and more, by harnessing Zoho’s proprietary AI engine, Zia.
Hyther Nizam, President for Middle East and Africa at Zoho, highlighted the critical importance of managing unstructured data, noting that approximately 80 percent of business data is unstructured. This figure aligns with numerous industry forecasts that emphasise the predominance of unstructured formats in enterprise data landscapes. Unstructured data generally exists in text-heavy forms such as emails, social media posts, and transcripts from audio and video recordings. For rapidly developing economies like those in the Middle East, the capability to apply AI-driven analysis to this vast reservoir of information can dramatically enhance decision-making, operational efficiency, and customer engagement.
Zia Hubs extends the functionality of Zoho WorkDrive by enabling businesses to organise content into dedicated hubs specific to teams or projects, ensuring controlled access to AI-driven insights. Once content—including PDFs, spreadsheets, video files, or call logs—is uploaded to a hub, Zia automatically structures the data while preserving crucial contextual elements such as section headers, visuals, and cross-references. For multimedia content, Zia generates searchable transcripts and highlights key moments linked to relevant topics, facilitating rapid retrieval of precise information.
One of the standout features of Zia Hubs is its ability to answer complex queries across varied content formats, delivering responses that link directly to original documents or recordings. This capability supports a seamless and context-aware exploration of data, making it particularly valuable for industries like legal, finance, and customer support. Furthermore, integration with workflow automation via Zoho Flow ensures that content is continuously routed to the correct hubs for ongoing AI-powered analysis. Critically, Zia Hubs also ingests data from third-party platforms such as DocuSign, RingCentral, and Zoom, enabling comprehensive management and intelligence extraction across diverse data sources.
This launch is part of Zoho’s broader AI strategy, positioning Zia Hubs as a foundational layer for future enhancements that will employ intelligent agents capable of acting autonomously based on contextual data. Upcoming updates are expected to further refine the system’s ability to identify structured information within unstructured formats and trigger specialised AI agents to address specific business functions. This vision reflects Zoho’s unique advantage of owning its entire technology stack, spanning over 55 products, allowing for unparalleled integration and intelligent workflow activation within its ecosystem.
The importance of addressing unstructured data is underscored by industry analyses, which estimate that 80 percent of all global data will be unstructured by 2025. Despite this, a significant portion—up to 90 percent according to some reports—remains unanalyzed, resulting in missed strategic opportunities. Organisations worldwide face challenges in managing this data, which often resides in siloes or formats not readily compatible with traditional analytics tools. This has made AI-led automated data integration and intelligent content structuring critical for enterprises wanting to maximise their data’s value.
Enterprise data volumes are expected to reach staggering levels, such as IDC’s forecast of 175 zettabytes by 2025, with the majority being unstructured. Businesses must modernise their infrastructures to keep pace with these changes, or risk drowning in data without gaining meaningful insights. Solutions like Zoho’s Zia Hubs, which focus on structuring and making this data AI-accessible, are vital in overcoming the bottlenecks that typically hinder AI adoption in enterprises due to unstructured data formats.
Available by the end of Q3 2025, Zia Hubs will integrate fully with Zoho CRM, Zoho Desk, Zoho Projects, and Zoho Flow, giving companies across MENA—especially in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt—new tools to transform hidden content into actionable intelligence. This latest development signals a future where business content no longer remains a dormant asset but becomes a central driver of AI-powered automation and enhanced business outcomes.
Source: Noah Wire Services
