AI-driven coding delivering real productivity gains, says Zoho's Vembu

Sridhar Vembu says AI-driven coding is making dramatic productivity gains and transforming software work, even as Zoho broadens its ambitions into deep-tech fields such as hardware and quantum sensing

Sridhar Vembu, cofounder and chief scientist of Zoho Corporation, said that AI-driven coding has made dramatic, real productivity gains. While code, especially in SaaS, may become increasingly commoditised, the real leverage lies in the harness around AI, Vembu said as part of the Zoho Day address.

 

The company, which has completed 30 years, now has 1 million paying organisations globally, supporting over 150 million users, while recording 32 per cent year-on-year customer growth and a 20 per cent increase in revenue in 2025.

 

Vembu also highlighted that all the buzz around job losses may be a bit hyped. “Any new technology that came around ended up creating more jobs in the entire industry. Jobs get transformed. Also, as software becomes very cheap, maybe a lot more of it will be consumed. A lot of businesses have unsolved problems — now they can solve them, and that will evolve. In other words, if they solve many, many more problems, still, employment may go up. So they solve 10 times more problems; the employment may go up pretty much,” he said.

 

He also outlined Zoho’s broader ambitions beyond software, investing in deep tech such as hardware, chip design, quantum sensing and sodium battery research, framing the future as a “bits-to-atoms” shift where cheap intelligence enhances physical-world innovation — all guided by optimism, long-term thinking and a commitment to avoiding layoffs while transforming the company.

 

“Being bootstrapped, private and built entirely in-house makes Zoho an outlier among competitors,” said Vembu. “But vendors don't need our help, businesses do, which is why delivering customer value has, for 30 years, been Zoho Corporation's North Star.”