What's New In Zoho - May 2026 (+ Bonus: Connecting Claude AI to Your Zoho CRM)

00:00Okay, welcome to our What's New in Zoho May 2026 webinar. We've got a lot to run through today. We are going to be covering updates across Zoho CRM, Zoho Books. We've got a little bit of a grab bag of updates across other Zoho apps. We've then got a bonus topic of looking at how Zoho integrates with Claude, which is one of the big AI platforms in the world right now. A lot of what we'll cover there also applies to ChatGPT as well if you're a ChatGPT user. So we're going to you what you can do within Zoho. And then finally at the end we'll have time for a Q&A but please do ask questions throughout. I do try to keep an eye on the Q&A and the chat and I'll jump in and out as we're going trying to answer questions as we move through.

00:45So we'll get straight into it but a quick introduction from me. I'm Jake. I run a company called Limitless IT Consultancy. We work with clients primarily in the UK but we do offer some clients further afield as well to help them get the most out of their Zoho subscription. And today we're going to be helping you guys do that as well by showing you all the new stuff that Zoho's brought to Zoho One in the last month and how you can start using it in your system. So it's going to be a practical webinar where I actually show you how to utilize this stuff as well. It's not just me showing the features, it's how do you turn them on, how do you start using them yourselves.

01:18So hopefully you can go away today with some actions as well. So we'll start off with the CRM. We've got five updates. we're going to talk through today. We've got mirrored fields, we've got the QuickBooks integration, we've got AI email summaries, renaming system fields, and cross-module filtering. A lot of smaller updates this month may be barring the QuickBooks integration, but things are going to make a real difference to user experience, in particular this mirrored fields I'm really excited about. So without any stalling, let's get into it.

01:52So we're going to slide across here into our test system and I'm going to show you how this looks. So the first thing is let's say we're in an account in our CRM and I'll just use one of our test accounts here. Now I can see this account has some deals, it has a contact there and I can see I've got some information from the account. Now one of the things that I run into all the time with clients asking and I'm sure you get this in your own organisations too is okay I'm looking at the contact but I want to be able to see some information that's stored on the account.

02:25So let's say, for example, I am looking at the, let's say I'm looking at the account and I've got a field on here called, let's have a look, website. Now the contact, I can't see that website. So if I'm on the contact, I need to click into the account to then click on the website. It's not the end of the world, but it's a little bit of a faff to have to do if you're doing this day in, day out with lots of different contacts. So what I can now do is if I go into setup, so top right hand corner into setup, and then I'm going to go into modules and fields to edit our modules. I'm going to edit the contacts module in this case, and I edit the standard layout.

03:05Now what you'll see on the sidebar here is I've got this new section called components, and it's got one called mirror. Now what this allows me to do is drag in that mirrored component, and I'm going to choose where it's going to come from. So I'm going to say this is going to mirror data from the account. And it's going to mirror the website field. I'm going to hit done. I'm going to hit save. Now what's going to happen is if I now look at my account, I've got my website here. If I now go into my contact, I can now see that website now automatically shows on the contact.

03:43So really, really simple feature, but really, really useful. I can now click into that straight from the contact. The other place I think this is going to be really valuable is on deals. One of the things that comes up a lot when I'm working with clients is I'm looking at a deal now I need to click into the contact to be able to see the contact's job title or the contact's email, the contact's phone number. What I can now do again is I can go into the deal and I can use mirrored fields to pull that data directly from the contact and show it on the deal.

04:15So again it just makes things much easier. You can see I've actually done a test here already with the email but we'll do a different one now. We will pull through the let's say we're going to pull through the fax. I can't imagine many of these have a fax number in them but we will have a look. So I will go into a deal. If I refresh here you can see the fax is empty. But now if I go into the contact and I put something in the fax field, I'll be honest, I've never used a fax in my life. So I have no idea what a fax number looks like, but that might be a reflection of my age maybe.

04:54And now if I go back into the deal, you can now see that fax number is there instantly. So historically, the way you'd have to do this is write a custom function and have to somehow keep two fields in sync constantly. And inevitably something would get out of sync or wouldn't quite work as you wanted it to. This is built in, it's instant, it's really, really easy to use. Now the other benefit here as well is you can do this with multiple fields as well. So you can see I've already got two. There is a limit depending on your subscription level, but it's quite generous.

05:28So I think on Zaha One, I think it's 20 you can have. So there's quite a lot of options in terms of that data that you can pull through. The only real downside I can see is this isn't editable. So if I need to edit the fax, I then would need to click into the contact and edit it on the contact. It would then appear updated on the deal, but it's not editable on the deal. So just something to know there. I can see we've got a question here from Susan. What if you could have multiple deals on one account? Does it override or append? I'm not sure I fully get the question there, but effectively the way it would work is if I was on a if my account here so I'm looking at zoom zone and if they had multiple deals each deal would show the same field the same mirrored field that's being pulled through from the account or the contact it doesn't work the other way if you see what I mean so I couldn't from the account mirror from the deal there's a slightly different way you do that so in terms of hierarchy the mirrored fields work downwards.

06:31So from an account down to a deal. And the way that kind of works is if you notice from a deal. So each deal has one account, but each account has multiple deals. So it's the one way relationship where it works. So the deal can have the mirrored component, the account can't. That said, what you can do if you wanted to bring information from a multiple deals onto the account you have got another field in here called roll-up summary and this in a way is almost the flip side to a mirror so the mirror is looking down the roll-up summary is looking up if that makes sense so I can bring in the roll-up summary in fact let me switch to accounts so I can bring in roll-up summary and what I can do with this is I can say a number of deals And I can then say, OK, I want to roll up information from the deals module.

07:28I want to count the number of deals. I could get the average value of the deals. And then I can add a criteria. So what I might want to do is say have average open deal value. And then what I can do from here is I can say, OK, I want to get the average and the average of the amount field and I only want the deals where the stage is open and what that will do then is that will then add a field onto my account so if I go back to zoom zone which is a great name I can then scroll down and you'll then see and it'll take a minute to process because we've just added it that will roll that information onto the account so then it'll show me the number the average open deal value for that account.

08:20So you've got those two options there. You have the mirrored fields for showing information downwards and you have the roll-up field for rolling upwards. Hopefully that makes sense. It's a bit of a weird concept to get used to just in the way that Zaha works but it is quite flexible and the sums here work quite nicely as well. So one of the ones I do quite a lot these days is I'll have a roll-up field which is number of open tasks because then from the overall screen, I can then go into, like I can now, average deal value. I can also then go in and say, okay, show me any contacts with an open task, let's say, and it makes it really easy to create a filter.

08:58So those roll-up fields are equally as good as those mirrored components as well. Okay, so next on our list is the native QuickBooks Online integration. So this is a brand new edition from Zoho. So if I go into the settings again, you'll see under the marketplace tab, I've got an ever growing list of things I can connect to Zoho. And the latest one is the QuickBooks integration. Now, unfortunately, I can't do the full QuickBooks integration in this session, partly because it's going to take a little while to do. But the way the QuickBooks integration works is when you click install you'll log in with your QuickBooks account.

09:41It will then take you to a configuration screen and it'll actually allow you to automatically sync your contacts, your accounts and your invoices to and from QuickBooks. So the way it will work is you can create an invoice in the invoices module in CRM and that invoice will automatically sync into QuickBooks. This is a really great integration. Now, I'm personally hoping they do this for Xero as well. My thought is, my inkling is that because they've done it for QuickBooks, the chances are they probably will look to do this now for other finance tools as well.

10:16But it's a big bonus for clients that are using QuickBooks. It means we no longer need to do a custom integration to do that. So definitely worth checking out. And it's worth looking at the rest of what's in this marketplace list as well. If you go into the all tab, you've got extensions and plugins made by all sorts of third party developers. I'll be honest, not all of them are particularly amazing. There are some good ones in there. But all of the options below are all built by Zoho and there's some really good stuff in here. So, for example, in the Microsoft one, you can sync your Microsoft calendar with the Zoho calendar, which means if you've got a meeting booked with somebody in your Outlook calendar, It will show up as a meeting in Zoho CRM, which is great for reporting.

11:02But you can also sync your contacts. And this is great because it means when someone emails you, if their details are already in the CRM, it will automatically show up in the email. So all of that kind of stuff that you'd expect. Likewise, in Google, you can sync your Google Calendar, your Google Contacts. You can connect to Google Ads. So it's worth exploring that marketplace section because there's quite a lot in there, including what's only been added last year is the ability to map leads from LinkedIn, Facebook and TikTok into the CRM as well.

11:35Now, this is through a separate plugin that Zoho has developed called Lead Chain. There's an additional cost to doing this. You get 50 free leads per month through it. After that, you have to pay Zoho a little bit extra. But what this means is if you're running advertising on LinkedIn and say have a LinkedIn form that people fill in, you can map that form directly to the CRM. So as soon as somebody fills it in, they come through with a lead in the CRM. Most importantly, with all the metadata, so the UTM tracking and everything else all comes back into your system.

12:06So definitely worth exploring that section of the CRM because a lot of people don't look at this, but there's a lot of powerful stuff in there. Okay, so next thing we're going to look at is some AI email summaries and some general AI summaries. So the first thing you're going to want to do is within Zoho's CRM setup, we're going to want to go down into this hidden bit at the bottom, the ZIA, or ZIA, depending on who you ask, settings. Now there's a whole load of settings in here. I'm going to skip over some of these today because it's probably a separate webinar, things like agents.

12:43But if you go through here, what you'll of options in terms of data enrichment, predictions, recommendations, communication, lots of different little AI tools are already built into Zoho that you can just switch on. The one that you're going to want to switch on though is down in models. Now enabling any of the models here is what then allows you to use the intelligence within CRM to ask questions around records and look at email summaries and things like that. Now what's nice about the model section is you can use Zoho's own model and I'll be honest their own AI model is a little bit limited it's not the best but you can also connect third-party models as well so you can see we've connected OpenAI here.

13:29Now there is a caveat here if you connect a third party you will pay for the usage of that model with the third party. Zoho doesn't charge you anything but OpenAI will or Anthropic will or Google will, whoever you decide to go with. But it makes the models much, much more powerful. So I'll show you an example of how this looks. If we go back into our CRM, in fact, let's look at Zoom Zone, just because I like the name. You will see at the top here, I've now got this record assistant button. And this is where I can access my AI. In fact, I'll just refresh a moment just because I made a change then.

14:04So when I click on there, that will then load up my AI. Now, if I've got multiple models enabled I can switch between them so I can switch between Zoho's model and the OpenAI model and that will then allow me to talk to OpenAI and ask questions about this account. Now this is all fake data so I don't know if a company called ZoomZone exists but it looks like it does so let me ask OpenAI here so can you tell me more about the company ZoomZone so that will now send the request and it's going to start looking at the additional information fortunately it looks like it doesn't have any more information on zoom zone so probably a probably a bad example because it's not a well-known company but what it also allows me to do is query information about the record now if I have a record in here with notes so let me have a look for a moment for a contact with some notes, which I think we've got in here.

15:05Let's apply. There we go. So I've got some notes here on this record, so I can open that up. And if I scroll down, you can see there's a couple of notes in there that I've done as a test. So I can now click my record assistant. It's going to load up. I can switch between models. By the way, if you don't want to switch between models and you always want OpenAI, you can just turn off Zoho's model and then it will just default to OpenAI as well. So I can now say give me a summary of this contact based on the fields and notes added. Now obviously this is hard to demo when it's really hard to demo as it turns out when we're in a test system because we don't have a great deal of information in here because we're not using this as a real CRM.

15:57However, where I've seen this work really well is if you're a sales team and you're creating deals or you've creating contacts or accounts and you're adding notes, this is a great way to get an update on what's going on because you can go into that and you might have a hundred different notes in there over the lifespan of that particular contact. You can go in and you can query, you can ask questions. Let's just see, just see if we can make a difference. If we use Zaho's own model, does it give us anything? There we go. So in fact, let me give it a record summary.

16:31So in Zaho's model, I can click these three little lines and I can actually give it, ask it for a specific thing. Here we go. So now it is now going through and giving me a record summary. So it's a relatively lightweight summary because again, there's not a great deal of information on here, but you can imagine if you're using this in your real CRM where you've got a load of different contact information. You've got notes, you've got your emails, you've got call history, how useful this would be. So for example, again, I can go into note summary and it'll give me a summary of my notes. Obviously in this case, there's not enough content because we've only got a couple of test notes in there.

17:08So I recommend turning this on. Just again, the way you do that is into setup, then under Zaya, and it's specifically models and you want to enable the model. You may notice when you first turn this on, it might take a couple of hours before the special icon up here appears. It's just because Zoho's basically got to go through your data to start understanding and building the context to then use for these models. Once you've given it that time though, you'll then be able to see that information and you'll be able to click the button and start prompting it to ask questions.

17:40So again, really helpful. The other thing it allows you to do is if I go in and send mail, you will see I can also go into here and use the record assistant to create a message. So it's going to fetch my messages and I can say, write a sales email about our gardening services to Jake Harris. So if I give that a moment, what it will do is it should draft us an email with a bit of luck. Here we go. I will say the biggest curse of working with AI is naturally it's slightly unpredictable. So when you're doing things like this, you're never 100% sure what you're going to get out of it.

18:25But you can see it's now written us a nice email and I can then copy that in. And what it should do, and sometimes it just gives you the button to insert into email and it'll insert in there as well. Again, still a little bit unpredictable. This stuff's a little bit new still so just take it with you know be be vigilant whilst you're using it but certainly for record summaries it's really useful. I think what I'm going to show you later with Claude though is going to blow this out for water so we'll come back to that in a little while. So last couple of things again pretty straightforward things in here is renaming system fields.

18:59So another long-term irritation for clients is if I look at an account and I scroll down and I bet all of you on here will will be well aware of this. I'm in the UK, yet here we've got billing province and shipping province and then billing code and shipping code. Billing code and shipping code you can kind of get away with, but we would just call it postcode. Province isn't a word we use in the UK, it's just not how we describe it. We would have a county. Now up until now there's been no way of changing that. The only workaround has been to do like a translation and pretend you're using a translation file. It's a little bit of a hacky workaround.

19:38It kind of did the job, but wasn't perfect. Now, though, we can simply rename it and it'll be a sigh of relief for every new starter of Soho CRM because it drives people mad. I can now go in, I can go into accounts and before where the field would be grayed out. I can now go down and I could just change that to county if I could spell. So pop that in there, pop that in there. We'll just call that billing and shipping postcode. And it's as simple as that. You can now rename those system fields. And that goes for any system field as well. So things like account name, account owner, any of those system fields. So the other one actually that I often rename is when you go into leads, for example, there is a field in here called somewhere in here.

20:31It is usually out of the box just called title. And again, confuses people because they think it might be, is it Mr. or Mrs., that kind of thing. What it actually means is job title. So again, we can now rename that to make it much easier to use. So it's a silly little thing, but it makes a big difference to the usability of the overall system. And then our final thing in the CRM today is cross-module filtering. So this has actually been live for a little while, but they've made some big improvements to it recently. So what this now allows us to do is when I'm in any module I can now go in and I can create a custom view and I've always been able to do this.

21:10When I create the custom view I can now create a custom view based on data in related modules. So I'm going to do this as accounts with open deals. So instead of specifying based on account and filtering based on account. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to say I only want accounts with deals where the deal stage is open. And if I hit save, that's now giving me a list of just my accounts with open deals. Really, really simple to do now, but was impossible prior to this update. It would mean having to build a report or do something in analytics.

21:54Now you can just do it with a custom view. So some of the ways I use this, for example, is I might look at, say, contacts without any tasks. So if I go into here and I'll say contacts without future follow ups, this is something I actually do quite regularly for clients now. So I'll say I want all contacts where or without any tasks with a due date after today. So I'm going to say tomorrow onwards. Hit save. And then there I have a list of contacts that don't have any future actions. And if I want to take this a step further, I can go into edit.

22:39And I can even put it as my contacts without future actions. And I can go into here and I can say, OK, I only want where the contact owner is currently logged in user. And I can actually share that with everybody and hit save. So that view is now dynamic. So depending on who's logged in, when they look at it, they'll see just their contacts with no future actions. This has been really big for my clients that focus on account management. the way they often work is there should always be a future sales activity a future follow-up a future call booked with the key contacts within the different accounts and the way they were previously tracking that was via multiple analytics reports and yes it worked but it meant having to go into analytics into a separate Soho app it meant having to deal with the sync delay of every hour this is real time it's built in and it just is much easier to use so again another little feature that's been added to the CRM that makes a big difference to usability.

23:40And this can be used across any module as well. So any module with related information, this can be used in. The other thing you can do as well, if you want to take it a step further, you can filter by the parent module as well. So I can now go in and say, okay, I only want contacts where the contact owner is the logged in user and where the account, let's say account type is customer. again I can hit save and that will give me my view so I don't have anything in this view by just by chance but it just gives you a lot more options into building those filters so really worth looking at these custom views because there's a lot you can do with them now does that everyone sort of following along with this does that make sense to everybody yeah perfect it gives me a drink break whilst everybody's Perfect.

24:35I've seen a thumbs up. So that's good news. Okay. So next one is Zoho Books. We've got a couple of cool things in Zoho Books. The first one I am very excited about because this has been a long time coming. So I'm going to switch into Zoho Books now along the top tab here. Now for anybody that doesn't use Zoho Books, because I realize quite often when I do these webinars, everybody tends to already have CRM, but they might not have the other Zoho apps. Zoho Books is Zoho's finance tool. So it is their equivalent of Xero or QuickBooks or Sage or anything like that.

25:09And it's a full financial accounting system. It's what we use for our finances. It's what many of our clients use for their finances, including multi-million pound companies. So it has incredible sophistication to it. But the thing that they've added today is all around being able to look at your gross profit or your estimated gross profit when creating estimates. So I'm going to go into sales. I'm going to create a quote or an estimate, the same kind of same thing. If I go in and click new, if I now go down and I select my high GP item. So it pulls through my item details.

25:44I've got my quantity. I've got the rate of the item. I can apply a discount. I can add my tax or pretty straightforward. But I have no idea here as the salesperson as to whether I'm not I'm making any money here. Can I afford to give this person a 30% discount or a 40% discount? I don't know. The system doesn't give me any indication of whether I'm making any money or not. So what I can now do, and annoyingly this is turned off by default. I actually think it should be turned on by default. So I'm going to show you how to turn it on. If you go into settings, then under general, and then scroll down and it's slightly hidden.

26:23You have got profit margin. enable profit margin estimation at line item and transaction level. We're going to hit yes on that and save. Now when I go back into the system and this makes a huge difference and I go to create an estimate or a quote I'm going to go in and now you'll see I've got this new column for the cost price. Now when I select my high GP item it now pulls through my cost price, pulls through my rate and it gives me my gross profit. So now I can go in and say, okay, well, if I give a 40% discount, I can see now my GP is actually 83% because I'm still making 50 pounds on this.

27:06So it gives me that in real time. So I can see what money I'm actually making when I'm putting these quotes together. If I go in here for a low GP item, you can see this item here, the cost price is 15 pounds. I'm selling it for 10. I'm actually losing money there. So I want to do something about that. So I'm going to go in and say, actually, we're going to sell that for 20 pounds. And I can see that overall. And then if I scroll down, you'll get the overall gross profit for the whole order as well. Particularly important. I know a lot of my clients, they will have some loss leading products that they sell purposely at a loss because they know they're going to make the money on the bigger packages this is where they can now start seeing that in real time as they're quoting and as they're estimating and this this stacks as well so they can add as many items as they want it applies to quantity so if I say actually we're going to have 10 of those it will update what our gross profit is in there as well and that follows through the system as well so that'll follow through from quotes sales orders invoices and critically I can then see the difference as well so I can then start understanding, well, I thought we're going to make 500 quid here.

28:14Actually, by the time the stock came in and because we had to air freight it because we were in a rush, the landed cost was higher. We actually only made 300 pounds. So I can start to see those differences as well. So it's really, really important. The other thing that's really important here as well is if I click on the drop down here, I'm hoping I've got an example here, but I haven't. So let's just choose a different item. There's a better one. There we go. So my stock item is a better example. So all of these items here, it's pulling through the cost price that I've set on the actual item.

28:53However, when you're shipping stock, you're constantly buying and selling that stock at different rates, particularly buying that stock. I mean, a lot of the clients I work with at the moment, they're battling with rising costs of different materials. So the cost price that's on the item is quite often out of date because the real world cost price is changing all the time. So what this system also does is if an item is a stock item, instead of you using the item price, it will actually use the inventory valuation price. And for most systems, that will be based on a FIFO system.

29:28So that will be based on first in, first out, and it'll take the cost price from that. So this is going to be far more realistic in terms of what your cost price is. And again, this just happens by default. So you don't have to do anything to calculate that inventory valuation cost. It will do it itself. So again, just gives you far more visibility over what you're doing in Zaho Books. So from a quoting perspective, I think this is going to be a real game changer in terms of how you can use Zaho Books because it just gives you so much more visibility.

30:00So 100% recommend everybody turn this on. even if you're not a client or not a customer or not a user that thinks about GP on a per line basis, I'd still recommend having it on because it gives you that overview as well, which you can then use in reporting. So it's a really powerful new feature that they've added and kind of added as a little bit of a hidden gem, actually. I don't know why they've not made a bigger deal of it. I don't know why they've not just turned it on by default, but yeah, a huge improvement. So 100% recommend turning that on.

30:30The next thing we're going to talk about is under the document section. So unfortunately as a company you will get a lot of bills and you have to enter those bills into your financial system. So Zoho has long had a feature where you're able to upload receipts, it's scanned and you can then create bills from it but you had to pay extra for that. Zoho has now changed that so that's now included with your Zoho subscription. Now it will depend on how many, what your Zoho subscription is to how many receipt scans you get included per month but from what I've seen the numbers going to be are pretty generous and the way this works is I can go in I can take an invoice and drop it in here and it will scan that invoice so this is actually my invoice from Anthropic for Claude as you can see it's done that and I can then go in and I can then create a bill and now instead of me entering all of this information manually it's pulled it out for me and all I've got to do is correct any details that are needed. So in this case it's a new vendor so I'm going to hit add new vendor, put my VAT treatment in there and I can go through and fill out the details but much quicker than having to enter things manually particularly if it's a long invoice.

31:43This is an easy one because it's just one line but if you've got an invoice with 50 different line items this will do it almost in an instant. Doing it manually could take could take you an hour. So we'll save that. Just need to save, select an account type. There we go. We'll say it is that particular account. And that is now created as a bill. So again, built in feature. A lot of people don't know about this and that's now becoming free. So you'll no longer need to buy add-ons to have to do this. The other thing I recommend is you can configure, if I hit the configure button, a special email address.

32:18What that email address allows you to do is forward your receipts directly into Here2B scan or even places like Amazon allow you to add an invoicing address. If you put that email, a special email in as your invoicing address, it means things like your Amazon receipts will come directly into Zoho Books, will be scanned. So all you've got to do is create the bill and match the payment. So again, just save some admin time. So really recommend coming into here and taking a look. And then the final thing we've got on here is the bank account access.

32:52So I think there's a typo that it's not limitless bank account access. It is limited bank account access. We're trying to be on brand clearly. So within Zoho Books, you can connect your bank account to get real time bank feeds coming in. This is really helpful for most businesses that want to do track, well need to track their transactions. So it means you haven't got to import bank statements. They just show up automatically. The problem is if you want to give people access to be able to look at those banks so they're able to link payments to invoices or payments to bills you have to give them access to all of your bank accounts which isn't necessarily always what you want. You might have somebody that's just there to record payments on invoices so they don't necessarily need to see what's in the company savings account for example.

33:37What you can now do is within settings when you are adding users and roles you can now set within the roles you can say I've got test user role here you can now set segmented access control so when I tick that so you can see I've enabled segmented access control on bank accounts that means anybody in that role will only get access to the bank accounts I specifically give them access to so now when I go back into my banks I'll go into my demo bank here I need to go in and go into edit to give those users access so in this case I haven't got a second user but I would then go in and give those users access so what this does is it means you can give people access to the bank accounts they need without giving them access to everything again there's a relatively minor feature but particularly for as Zoho tries to target larger and larger companies it's a really critical feature so that you are only sharing the information with people that need it.

34:38So again a really important new addition there. So we've got a couple of smaller things to run through now and then we'll get on to the Claude demo. Before we run into our grab bag does anybody have any questions or anything they'd like me to answer on the things that we've covered so far. No, that is all good. Okay, so a couple of new things we've got in here. We're going to start on Zoho Analytics. We've got a quick thing on Zoho Projects and then a quick thing on Zoho Mail. So we're going to start with Zoho Analytics. So if you're new to Zoho Analytics, Zoho Analytics is a reporting platform that allows you to connect data from across all of your Zoho apps, but also lots of third party apps to build live dashboards of information for your company.

35:39So for example, in here I've got something, I've got a demo here of a report of high value deals. So this is set up to be any deals where the, in fact, it's just a, it's just any deals created this month is this report. it's just a demo report and you can see I've got a list of deals in here. Unfortunately this is a test system I do not have a list of deals that looks quite this good unfortunately but you can say I've got my list of deals in here. Now the report is great the report gives you the information but it doesn't take any action for you.

36:14So what Zoho has now added is the ability to create triggered actions. So if I go into here and create an alert, I can give this an alert. I'm going to just call it demo. And I'm going to say I want to trigger an alert whenever there is a deal where the country is or contains United Kingdom. So what this is going to do now is on a daily basis at 1am is going to look to see does the report contain any deals where the country is United Kingdom. Now if it does what it's going to do is then perform an action. I've got a number of actions I can perform and these are these have always existed so I can say send someone an email, drop a notification, send a slack message, a teams message, a webhook, all great and we use these quite a lot. So things like if something goes wrong, if something says ends up on an error report, it sends out an email alert and things like that.

37:19What we can now do is configure a workflow. And what this means we can do is trigger things in other systems. So I'm going to go in and call this test and hit create. And it brings up this workflow builder. And this allows me to now build a workflow off of the back of my report. So we'll give it a moment. This has been a little bit slow. there we go so I can see then this is being triggered here by the sub flow but I can now go in and I can now trigger actions across all of these apps I think there's about 500 in here you can see there's absolutely loads in here so let's say for example I want to trigger a I don't know a task being created in ClickUp whenever a new deal in the UK is created I can now go in and I can search for ClickUp and I can now go in and I can trigger it to create a task and I can go out and I can build that process out and I can actually do multiple steps here as well. So it might be that it creates a ClickUp task, it sends an email and then it invites somebody into the ClickUp board all within the report.

38:26Now the thing that most people are probably thinking at this stage I imagine is when would I use this because it's a bit of a nicher feature but I think it's still important. And the way that I think this is going to be used most is when you want to trigger actions based on an aggregated amount of data. So for example, what I mean here is, let's say you've got a number of, you've got a number of deals in the system and you want to know, well, if the deal volume, if the deal value ever drops below, say 50k in the pipeline, we need to alert a load of people or we need to trigger a certain action.

39:04Now you could do that in a CRM. You could have a scheduled automation that runs every day and you have to write a load of code that looks to counts up the value of all the deals and then triggers something if the value is below. But that would involve writing code. It involves having a schedule that can either run I think every two hours at most. It's not a very user-friendly way of doing it. So what instead I could do is I could build a simple report in analytics that shows me the deal value. I could then create an alert that set that if the total on that report is less than 50k it then triggers a workflow and that's then where I would use this workflow builder to be able to trigger different actions throughout Zoho.

39:42So again it's not going to be a feature you're going to use every day but I think it's going to give you a lot more flexibility with the different things you could potentially do with your reports. So as I say it's just a quick one here but I wanted to highlight it because I see us been using this more in the future. And as we do, we'll share it on LinkedIn as well and give you examples of where we're using this to do more within Zoho Analytics. So next up we've got is Zoho Projects. And this time we're going to be looking at the summary fields.

40:15So this is quite similar to what we looked at right at the beginning of our call today. When we were in the CRM, we actually looked at the roll-up fields where we're rolling up information onto the account from the deal. We can now do that within Zoho Projects as well. Now just before we go any further, a quick background on Zoho Projects. Zoho Projects is Zoho's project management tool, if it didn't sound obvious anyway. Very similar to something like Jira or Asana or ClickUp or any of those other project management tools. The advantage here is obviously it's built into Zoho and it's integrated really nicely with Zaho. So one of my favorite features of Zaho projects is you can set it so as soon as a deal is won, it generates a project with a template of all the tasks you need.

41:01So we do this with a lot of our clients where they win a deal, they then know there's a load of things they need to do once that deal's won. So a project is created with all those tasks in it, with the correct deadlines and the correct assignees automatically. So a really, really powerful tool but the big change that they've made or the big addition they've made is the ability to add roll-up fields. So if we go in and create a new tab here we're going to go into setup again we're then going to go into project customization sorry and we're going to go into layouts and we can edit the layout we can either do this on the project or the task we'll do on the project level So we're going to edit the project layout and you'll see we've got this summary field.

41:48If I bring this in, I can't add those up there, so we'll put it down here. What I can then do, and this is really similar to what I showed in the CRM earlier, where you can roll up information. So I can now say, OK, I want to roll up, say, the number of tasks, the number of issues, maybe the time logs, maybe we'll do time. So I'm going to say roll up time logs. So I'm going to say I want to have a count of the, let's have a look of the, let's do the approved time. And we want to get a, the max approved time. I can then put that in there. In fact, let's do something a bit different because it's a bit easier to show.

42:30Let's do number of issues and we'll count the number of issues. So I can hit save. And if I now go back into my board here and refresh, so this is my list of projects. If I scroll across to the end, you'll see my new field now shows there. Now I can move that along if I want, so I can bring that down. Pop that there. Now if I go into this particular project and I log an issue, in fact, let's log two. Now, when I go back to my project view, you can now see, I can see right from the top view that there are two issues within that project. And in fact, I did a similar thing in preparation for this webinar where I did the number of tasks.

43:17And you can see that shows there automatically as well. So again, pretty straightforward addition, but really helps with visibility to be able to see exactly what's going on at any one time, because I can now see that right from that view. And obviously these are customizable as well and they can be used at different levels as well. So I can also use them on tasks so I can roll up information from tasks. And actually tasks is one of my favorite places to use them because on tasks I've got a lot of information I can pull through including things like comments.

43:48So one of my favorite things to do is look at how many comments there are on something because that's quite often an easy way of being able to see where are tasks being processed and where have things been forgotten about. whether or not people are commenting and updating the status of those tasks. So again, another small but really useful feature in Zoho projects. Then the final one we've got is Zoho Mail. So I'm just going to switch into Zoho Mail quickly. We'll open this up, access Zoho Mail. Oh, you can see here's my subscription to Claude.

44:21Now this is a test mail system in here as well. There's nothing we need to worry about sharing in here. But what we have now got is, and we'll see if it's going to show up. Because this is brand new, is there is now the ability to create a catch all email address in Zoho Mail. Now, what this means is if you're using Zoho Mail and somebody emails you. So let's say my email, which is here, is jake at gardenskylines.com. Let's say somebody accidentally thinks it's my first and last name and they put jake.harrisgardenskylines.com. Currently that email is just going to bounce and I will never get it.

45:05The end user might get a bounce back and they might then realise they've got it wrong and send it to the right place. But otherwise that email is lost. What catch all emails allow you to do is basically set Zoho mail to say, OK, if someone emails us and that email address doesn't exist, just put it in this place. So I can say, OK, any emails that go to these, any these email addresses that don't exist, put them all into my inbox anyway. So I see them. Particularly helpful things like customer support where customers might not get the right email.

45:36They might mistake a typo or something like that. It will still come through. The only bit you've got to get right is the after the at, because effectively that is then how they know it goes to your Zoho mail. If they get that bit after the at wrong, unfortunately, there's nothing Zoho can do there. But it's a useful little feature, that catch all email address to be able to make sure you're getting all of the emails that are coming through. So, again, another little feature that is really powerful. So next thing I want to talk about is our bonus topic of how we can use Claude by Anthropic and Zoho together to start utilizing AI more with Zoho.

46:15I've just seen there's a question as well about QuickBooks. The integration, I'm afraid, is only available for QuickBooks Online. It's not available for the desktop edition. And if I'm honest, I doubt there will be any change to that. I think QuickBooks's long-term picture is probably to be all online anyway. And I think that's where Zoho is focused on building those integrations. So it's only QuickBooks Online, I'm afraid. OK, so let's get into talking about Claude and Zoho. So if you're new to AI, there's lots of different AI tools out in the world at the moment.

46:51The two probably biggest or three biggest right now are ChatGPT by OpenAI, Claude by a company called Anthropic and Copilot by Microsoft. There's also Google Gemini as well if you're a Google business. So you've got quite a few different options. Now, most of them work in a pretty similar way. They have some slight different skills and strengths and things like that. internally at Limitless we use Claude it's actually what Zoho use Zoho use Claude as well and it's generally what we recommend to our clients we have a subscription to all of the different AI platforms because we see it as important that we're taking time to understand what works well and consistently Claude has performed the best for the things we're looking to do as a business so I wanted to give you an example of the types of things we're doing in Claude and how they could be useful to you.

47:43Now I suspect there'll be questions on this so please do ask them as we're going through and I'll make sure to try and answer them all as we go. So to get started I'm going to open up Claude so I have it just here. Now I've created a Claude account. This is a test system but I have paid for it partly because the usage limits on the free version of Claude are quite limited and there are some stuff you can only do on the paid edition I wanted to be able to demonstrate. So right now I don't have anything connected to Claude. So if I ask it who is in my CRM, it's not going to know because it doesn't have that information right now.

48:23So you're going to say, I don't have any CRM information. So what I need to do is connect up Zoho CRM to Claude. So the way I'm going to do that is from Claude, I'm going to go into customize. I'm going to go into connectors and then you'll see I've got not connected. You can see Zoho CRM here because I connected it previously. What you'll want to do is hit the plus button, go to browse connectors and then search for Zoho. And you'll see there's a couple there at the moment. They're adding more all the time. Literally today they added Zoho Analytics.

48:59But you can see you've got Zoho CRM, Zoho Project, Zoho Books and Zoho Desk. add whichever ones you're using within Zoho. Today I'm going to focus on CRM but the other tools as well work in a similar fashion and when you hit add it will then take you to a screen to connect your Zoho. So I'm going to go in and it may ask you which version of your Zoho you're going to connect because I've got a sandbox system. In my case I'm going to connect the CRM, the production system. Then it's going to give me a long list of everything it can do. Now this looks quite scary because you can see you're giving access of all of these abilities to Claude.

49:36It won't do any of them without asking you first so don't be afraid at this stage. So I'm going to go in and allow and hit accept. Now that'll take a second and you will see it's now shown up as a connector and what you'll see is it's listed all of the things it can do and then out of the box everything will need approval as you can see here. So you can see all the read only tools and all of the write tools all need approval. Now I've gone in here before and played around with this which is why some of these are already changed. What you can do and what I normally do is for the read all tools I make them always allowed because I'm always happy for Claude to query my CRM and get data but then for the write and delete tools I will change it so I will say okay you can write things without asking me. But if you want to delete something, you're either going to be blocked or you'll need to ask permission.

50:30And what I'll do is I'll leave these all now as needs approval, because I'll show you how that looks. So that's our CRM connected. What we'll do is we'll just quickly connect Zoho Books as well, because I can just give you some examples of that. Be exactly the same thing. You may notice it'll ask you for what version you're using. What you care about is at the end, when you look at Zoho, it'll be either.eu or.com for pretty that's watching this webinar. If it's.eu, you want Europe. If it's.com, you want US. Obviously, if you're any of these other regions as well, you want to select a specific region for you guys as well.

51:06Most of my clients and most of the people on here tend to be the top two. So I'm going to say it's Europe. I'm going to hit connect. And again, it's going to open a new tab. It's going to show me all the things it can do. I'm going to hit accept. And we'll give it a moment. And then again, it has connected all of that information. Again, all the read only stuff, I'm going to make it. I'm going to say it can allow all of the all of the needs approval. I'm going to leave as that for the time being. So now I can go back to my chat and now I can start asking it about things that are happening in my CRM.

51:41And these are things that I might just I could look up in my CRM. I might have a report for, but sometimes just asking Claude is way quicker than doing it in a manual fashion. So I'm going to say it go in and say how many leads came into. The CRM today. So really simple question. I've not even told it that it's the Zoho CRM. I'm just expecting it to know. And you'll see. There we go. 92 leads came into the CRM today. Here's a quick quick breakdown by lead source. So really, really quickly, I've got information that otherwise I may well have to.

52:20have built a report for I'd have to search through data but this has happened all pretty much instantly. So now I'm going to say okay who owns these leads? As you know in the CRM you can have lead owners so I'm going to ask it who owns them all so it's going to search that information. So the 92 leads are split between 81 are owned by Kirsty and 11 are owned by me. So I'm actually gonna say can you assign them all to me please? I'll put the please on there. I feel like you have to be polite. Could you let me know your name? There's the new Claude account, so it hasn't quite learned who I am at this point.

53:07Once you've used it for a while it will realize who you are and it will no longer ask. OK, so you can see now because I have asked it for to actually update something, it's now asking for my approval. So I can always allow or I can allow once. In my case, I'm going to go in and allow once. So it's now going to go through and do that. And what I might find is it may ask me again because it may need to make the request to Zoho more than once. So there we go. It's now done that. So let's go into the CRM. Let's look at my leads. I'm looking at today's leads already and we can see now all of them are now assigned to me.

53:52So there we go that has now worked. So again something I could do manually but could might take a little while I've now been able to do automatically. So what I can also see is there's quite a few here that don't have company names but they've all got emails. What that means is we can probably pull out who the company is based on the email. So what I'm going to say is can you date the leads without a company name to fill it in based on the email address. And again I can hit enter, it's going to go away and do that work for us. So things that in this case would be really quite manual I can now get Zaho to do automatically for me and it's going to go through and you can see it's pulling out company names it's not going to be perfect but it's going to give us more than what we did so it's going to go through it's listing them all again it's asking me am I allowed to update records I'm going to say I was allowed for now because this is a test system I'm not too worried about what it's doing so now it's gone through and you can see it's even cleaned them up for me. So this one here for Bible Gateway has been cleaned up. So if we go into here and refresh, look at that.

55:13That data is now much cleaner. You can see I've got my company in there and I haven't had to do anything. It's taken literally seconds for Claude to do this. Something that, yes, I could have done manually, but would have taken a lot of time to do. And you can see that's all gone in there. There was one in there that didn't have an email, so they've not been updated. Okay so let's do something slightly different. Let's say I have a load of leads from an event so I'm going to go in I'm going to get a fake data generator and let's say I have a load of leads that are coming from an event so the ID first name last name we don't need gender and let's say there's 40 of them and I'm going to generate some fake data here and in fact what I'm going to do is I'm going to say some of these are the first names blank.

56:03Let's say 20% are blank. I'm going to generate data. So that's now just generated an Excel for me with just some fake data in it. And I'll bring that over here so you can see it. Here we go. So I've now got 20 or sorry, 40 leads in here with information. So now again, I could import that manually into the CRM, but I'm feeling particularly lazy today. So I'm just going to drag this in and I'm going to say can you import these into leads and in theory what it's going to do is it's going to look at that file it's going to dissect the details from that file and then it's automatically going to go ahead and do it and you can see it's even been clever because I've already asked it about mapping the company name based on the domain it's going to do that for me automatically it's also asking me now am I allowed to create records again I'm going to click oh is because I'm not too worried about it doing that.

56:59So it's going to go away and make those records. So I think when we looked previously we had 92 records so in theory in a moment we will see a load more. You can see the company name was inferred from the email address, 12 records were missing their first name. Great we knew that that was all good. So if I now go into here and refresh you can now see I've now got 132 and if I just sort by this descending which I have done you can see here we go here is our contact here if I go into our excel spreadsheet wherever it's gone and just search for this person you can see there they are and as you can see we didn't have a company name there we had an email address but Zoho has correctly identified this person as based on their email that they're from Barnes & Noble.

57:48So it's filled that in for me automatically. So a really quick way of being able to import data. It's really, really powerful. I can see we've got a question here. Can this be set up for my team and will my users be able to form the task you are demoing? I'm assuming permissions can be set by the Zoho users permission. Yes. So can this be set up for my team? That's from a client. So I'm expecting that's going on my ClickUp board to get done for them. But yes, absolutely. The way this works is each person, when they get access to Claude or OpenAI, whatever tool you decide to use, they will go in and once you've installed the connection, they will go in and actually go in. So like I've got GitHub here, each user will need to connect CRM or Zoho Books themselves and they will only have access based on their permissions module in the CRM.

58:44So if that user doesn't have access to delete in the CRM, they won't have the ability to delete via the connector. So it's all based on their Zoho permissions, their CRM permissions they've already got in the system. So it's quite a nice way of working because Zoho's already got quite a good way of managing those permissions. It all just rolls into what is within Claude, which can work quite nicely. So we've got that in there now. You can see I've had that conversation. is imported to data. All of this is looking great. We're really happy with this.

59:19But let's say I want to go maybe a step further now. I've got my leads in here, but let's say I want to get some more leads. So what I've done is I've connected a tool called Apollo. Apollo is a data enrichment and a lead list generation tool. It is a paid tool, but I'm just going to use it here as a demo. There are other tools that can do this kind of thing as well. I'm going to say use Apollo to find some leads for my gardening business in Hastings UK then add them to the CRM. Start with 10 new leads. OK, so now I've given Claude a little bit more of a sophisticated prompt.

01:00:13I've asked it to go ahead and first of all, use Apollo, a separate tool to go and find me some new contacts. Once it's found those contacts, I then want it to go ahead and add those contacts into my CRM. So this is the point where I'm starting to get to around not quite agent territory because I'm still doing this manually. But I'm going through an almost automating lead generation here. So these are real people. These are real people that have been found via Apollo. You can see I'm not too far from Plumpton College. You can see it's pulled up from people from Plumpton College.

01:00:51And it's pulled those out. And now it's going to go in and add these people to CRM. So it's just going to tell me, enriching those 10 people will consume 10 credits. Would you like me to proceed? Here are the people. Yes. Proceed and add to CRM. So it's letting me know that it's going to cost me some credits in Apollo to get the full information about these people. It's now going to be thinking about that. It's going to go ahead and do that work for me. And it takes a second. Oh, it's going to ask me, am I allowed to do this? Yes, I'm going to always allow.

01:01:23When you first start using Claude, you're going to hit that always allow button loads just as you start getting used to it. Perfect. And it's now going ahead and getting these people. So not everybody has a valid email address available on Apollo, which is a service we're using, but some people do. So it's going to go ahead and create what it can. So it's going to go ahead and do that. Honestly, I think some of the stuff you can now do with AI is so, so powerful and it's so cool what you can do. So here we go. I've gone ahead. You can see it's added these people.

01:01:55So what I could now do is go off and do a marketing campaign to these people if I wanted to. And you'll see if I go in here, it's used Apollo to gather name, email, phone number, all the information that is publicly available via Apollo. It has pulled through for me into my leads module so I can then do some outreach to that person. So again, something I can do manually, but much quicker to do it this way. And in that case, I only asked it to do 10. In theory, you could ask it to do that for a thousand people if you wanted to. you can be way more specific with your parameters and tell them exactly what type of person you need.

01:02:37And you can see here, if I see them correctly, identify the lead source for me. So really, really powerful in terms of what you can do here. Is this making sense to everybody so far? Does anybody have any questions they want to go through? Good question from Amy. How secure is it to allow AI tools to access customer data? Oh, it's a big question for after five o'clock in the afternoon. So it's going to depend and it's going to depend on one, which AI service you decide to use and two, what subscription and how much money you decide to pay them.

01:03:14Every different AI platform has its own security policy. It has its own rules in terms of what it's going to use your data for. We use Anthropic and we specifically use a paid version of Anthropic because we don't want any of our customer data to be used in any of their training. If you're using the free version, they can use your chat data and your customer data that you're pulling through into Claude to do training on. So my recommendation would be if you're going to do this, almost certainly do it with a paid model, because straight away that gives you a better level of protection almost across the board in terms of what these companies are going to do.

01:03:52but if you're in an industry that has very heavy compliance I'd probably consult a specialist in terms of what what they're going to do with your data based on those privacy policies because every company is a little bit different in terms of what their rules are as I say Claude works well for us we pay for it so our customer data isn't used in any training so it's something to bear in mind particularly I know in the legal industry it's really really powerful AI but the rules around what you can do are even more specific. So it's worth consulting somebody if you feel the need to.

01:04:29But yeah, my main recommendation would be use a paid model because then for most of the paid models, your data isn't being used in training. Hopefully that answers your question. Okay, so let's go in and do another demo because I think we can do better than what we've done so far. So, so far we've asked it some basic questions around what's in the CRM, we've asked it to import some data, we've asked it to find some data online and add some information to the CRM. What I'm now going to do is ask it to build us a report. So let's say I want, build me a report of all the leads added this month by lead source.

01:05:20There will be more than 200 leads. I'm going to ask it to go ahead and do that. The reason I've told it there's more than 200 leads is just because I've done this a couple of times now. By default, Zaha will only respond with 200 bits of data at a time. so sometimes what Claude looks at is it says I've got my 200 leads perfect I will build my report whereas actually there's 450 leads it just didn't realize it needed to subsequently ask for more information so just over time you start to learn these little quirks and interestingly because Claude has memory it starts to learn it as well so as you start almost training it to say hey look you need to get more data it will remember that it needs to get more data every time So it's going to go ahead and it's going to get that data.

01:06:08So it now says I have enough data across all pages. Let me also check if there's more records. And let's do a cross-reference here of how many leads there are this month. So we'll just quickly create a custom view. I'm going to say where the created time is current month. OK, so this is giving us 2,500. So we've got quite a few in here. So I've hit an API 2000 limit. I have all the data I need. So in this case, it's running to a limit because it's trying to get more data than what's allowed. But I'll show you how we can fix this in just a moment.

01:06:50But what it's going to do is hopefully build us a little interactive report. So here we go. So we've got 2000 plus leads, top sources trade show. There's 19 lead sources, 14% are unattributed. and what it's going to do is start to build us a report and again this is all happening in Claude and again I could do this manually it'd take me a little bit of time this has now done it for me automatically and I can now see that very quickly on our chart here and in fact it even's going to give me a summary below which is great now that's capped at 2000 records so what I'm going to tell it to do and this is going to get a little bit technical now so I'm going to apologize but it's worth knowing if you're going to use any of these tools just because it's a workaround when you've got lots of data.

01:07:37I'm going to ask it to use the query API. So I'm going to say I need the report to include all leads from this month. Please use the query API. Now, the reason I'm telling it that is the query API can support more records. So this will allow it to much, much more efficiently gather all the information. And again, you're starting to see some of the trade-offs now. Some of the stuff we did initially, it was really quick and easy. It didn't have a problem. Now we're starting to ask it something a little bit more complicated. It's now having to, we're having to kind of try to explain to it almost how it needs to do some of this stuff and again the more we use Claude the more Claude learns about what we're going to do and also the more Zoho improves its documentation the more Claude's knowledge increases and you can see it's just working through what we're doing here there we go look you can see good it goes beyond 2000 sometimes you get some quite entertaining responses from Claude.

01:08:46I was working on a Word document and I just asked it a question to update something and for whatever reason it went a little bit rogue and it deleted half the content and its response that it put out was just oh no sorry I've made a terrible mistake. I've deleted half of your document. Oh great. Luckily you can just hit undo so no damage was done but it does give you a little bit of a laugh sometimes when these things happen. You can see because I've asked it something a little bit more complicated it's taken a little bit longer however you can see now I have all the records so it can now go ahead and it's now going to be able to build that report for us with that different information.

01:09:30So I'll take a second to do that but it's now building so I can now see total leads, what's going on and all of the information. Now here's the pro tip because what I might want to do now is see this report every month, every week, whatever it might want to be. But I don't want to have to keep rebuilding this every time I do it because I'll have to wait for Claude to do it. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to say this is great. Can you write some project instructions so you can do this every month. So what I'm going to tell Claude to do now is look back at everything it's just done and now write some instructions for itself to make it easier for to do this when we want to do it every month. So it's going to go away now and write its own instructions.

01:10:25And this is one of the best ways to use any AI tool is almost start with the end in mind, get it to solve its problem, write its own instructions and then use that as your starting point. Don't try and write the instructions yourself. So that's going to take a second. And again, because we're asking it some stuff that's slightly more complicated, it's going to take a little bit more time to do this. But you can see it's spinning through what it's doing. As that's doing that, what I'm going to do, oh, here we go. It's actually done already. So it's now created an instruction file for what needs to be done.

01:10:57Now I'm not going to worry about reading this I'm just going to hit the copy button and what I'm going to do is I'm now going to go into projects and I'm going to create a new project and I'm going to call this lead source report and then I'm going to go into instructions I'm going to add those instructions that is created for itself. So and it's even giving me example prompt here. So now I can go in and say generate a monthly lead source report for what should we do? April 2026. Hit enter. And I haven't had to give it any more information now because now it has its project with its instructions.

01:11:40It remembers now how it did this before. So it's going to be able to do it again really, really quickly because it's not having to solve its problem again. It already knows exactly what API calls to make. It knows what the report's going to look like because it's got those instructions. So I really recommend projects because once you've solved the problem once, turn it into a project and then you can keep reusing that solution again and again and again. We do this all the time. So I'm going to give you a couple more examples whilst that's building. I'm actually going to swipe across because one of the problems I have when doing this is it's hard to show you really sophisticated responses because enough data in our test system.

01:12:19So what I did earlier today is I used our real Claude and I asked it some real questions about real data in our system. And I asked it to build and I took some screenshots to show you exactly what came out. So the first thing I did is I said, I'm catching up with so-and-so tomorrow. Can you give me a quick refresher on the company, key people, along with a summary of their projects from ClickUp? ClickUp is what we use for project management. So You can see at the top, it did a little bit of thinking and it said, here's your briefing for tomorrow.

01:12:52Now, I have gone through and I've blurred out names just so it's not sharing exactly who this is. But you can say medium sized law firm operating a consultant led model. Solicitors join the self-employed consultants rather than being employed. Blah, blah, blah, blah. It tells me a bit about the software they're using. Gives me a breakdown of who's on the call. So here we go. Founder and CEO doesn't usually join, but reference for onboarding questionnaire sign off. Alice is one of our team. And then below it can see, okay, currently in flight, Zoho desk, cyber policy, application form tweaks, backlog, is we've got a couple of things here, and then there's a couple of open threads here as well.

01:13:31So it gave me a really quick overview really easily. So it was a really good tool to use for that. I could have found this information. I could have gone into ClickUp. I could have gone into CRM. I could have looked back through some past emails. Instead, this worked great. Now, this is kind of an easier example. Now I'm going to show you an even more useful example. So I had a sales call about two weeks ago. It was after the last webinar I did. And it was with somebody. And I'd spoken to that company before. And I knew it was a long time ago. I couldn't quite remember what we'd spoken about. I couldn't quite remember where we'd gotten to.

01:14:06So I went in and I said, I'm just about to have a sales meeting with someone from, I put their company name and the name of the person I'm talking to. I know I've spoken to them four. Can you find any notes from CRM or Fireflies? Fireflies is an AI note taker that joins all of our meetings. When you start getting into the AI world, these note takers are really, really powerful because they allow you to query information from meetings that you may have even forgotten you had because it has all of that additional context. There's a bit of background there.

01:14:34So for the CRM and Fireflies to bring me back up to speed. And what it did is it went off and had a look in CRM, It had a look in Fireflies. It had a look at my emails even because I've got my emails connected. And it came back and it says, quick brief, no Fireflies transcript existed for this account. Turns out the meeting was before we'd signed up to Fireflies. But there's significant history in email and CRM. So who you're meeting. So they're a qualified lead in the CRM. They were created back in October 2025. They booked a meeting today after I sent a personal follow up.

01:15:11from our webinar. So again, that's great context that I might have missed otherwise, that this meeting was booked after I sent them a personal email following up of a webinar. They also registered for the What's New in Zaha webinar. You haven't actually spoke to them before. There's no phone designation or LinkedIn captured. The wider account history, this isn't a cold lead. They've been in your orbit for quite a long time. In August and September in 2025, I spoke to somebody who was head of custom success. They came in via another webinar. So again, really interesting to be able to see that coming through. So they came in via the dashboards and reports webinar that I did last year.

01:15:52I pointed them to a YouTube timestamp for something. She told you they have an outsourced dev partner already, but the partner is expensive on reporting and asked about one-on-one coaching at an hourly rate. We did a 30-minute sales call where we spoke about the limitless plan and they came back and said unfortunately they weren't looking for that ongoing support package now they wanted more of a one-off thing fair enough but all amazing context that you know this was what six seven eight months ago I didn't remember all of this I remember that I spoke to the company I didn't remember all this context off the top of my head and yes some of it was noted down in CRM but some of it was in my emails and I probably hadn't filled updated CRM quite as I should have done.

01:16:35This put everything together into one place. And it goes on even further. So it gives me a bit of an overview of the company. I blurred all that out just for the sake of the client. And it says, you know, what I'd be alive to going in. The CEO's one-off project not a retainer position from last September. So at the time, they wanted more of a one-off project rather than our kind of ongoing subscription that we work with. This person's unknown territory. They may have a different remit. The pain points on file were around dashboards and reporting, being expensive with their current partner.

01:17:14And it gave me all of that. And it also mentioned in there another person. So I said, have I ever spoken to this other person before? And then it went on and told me even more. It said, yes, I have spoken to them. You had an introduction meeting back in 2024. So now we're two years ago. I absolutely no recollection of this meeting. Again, it was two years ago. We speak to lots of people. I'm sure all the salespeople on this call, all the business owners on this call will live exactly the same. It's hard to remember something from that long ago.

01:17:42And it told me I had a follow up call with them, with the CEO as well. I sent over a proposal covering lots of different stuff. There was a bit of a pushback that it was more simplistic. They wanted to get straight into doing things. They didn't want to do a process review. And it gave us a load more context. And again, it put that all together. So this for me is the priceless bit of what we can get out of these AI tools. This is information that existed spread out across lots of different places. Some of it was in CRM. Some of it was on deals.

01:18:12Some of it was on the contact. Some of it would have been in leads. Some of it was in my email. Some of it was in past meeting transcriptions. This brought it all together. So when I went into that meeting, I knew exactly who I was talking to. I knew all of the context as if we just had that meeting a week ago because all of it was just there. And if I want to, of course, I can go in and I can ask further questions. I can ask more follow ups and I can get into even more detail. But yeah, for me, this is absolutely priceless. Really, really useful tool.

01:18:45If we swap back here now, you will see this is now updated our reports here as well. So you can now see it's built our report for April as well. You can see we've got quite a few in there that's unattributed, but trade show once again is the most popular. But this time it would have been much quicker because it already knew that context. I'll show you a couple other quick things just before we wrap up today, because I appreciate we are running out of time. I can also ask it to do things like this. So I can say create a new lead and let's do create a new contact with Jake Harris from Limitless IT Consultancy.

01:19:24look up his details on the web and using Apollo to fill in as many fields as possible. So I'm going to ask it to do that. Now whilst I'm here I'm just going to explain another part of Claude. Claude has a couple of different AI models so by default I'm on Sonnet. Now Sonnet is a pretty fast everyday model it's quite clever it's quite fast but if I'm doing something where I really want it to think about what it's doing I want it it's a bit more complex I can switch to Opus Opus is its more powerful AI model but it also consumes your usage a little bit quicker if I'm doing stuff that's really basic I can use the Haiku model which is much quicker but not quite as intelligent the way I do this is Haiku I use quite a lot if I'm asking it to like hey check for typos in this or hey can you refine that haiku is great it doesn't need world knowledge it just needs to know how to read English better than I can so I can give it that and it works great sonnet's what I use as a default if I'm asking it to do something I want it to be a bit more intelligent I might switch to opus the downside of opus is it can take a bit longer because it's going to think things through a little bit more but we'll see what it can do so it's going to look for my details it's going to ask if it can use a credit but in the meantime it's going to see what else it can find. So I found some solid details for Jake on the web.

01:20:52And to be fair, that's pretty good. It's got my name right. It's got my title right. It's got my company, my email, my location's a bit out of date, but I did live in Hastings till last year. It's got my LinkedIn, my website. It's got my university on this. That's all looking good. Let's say use the credit. So I'm going to do it. It's going to use the credit. So again, it's now going to look on Apollo. And you can see, to be fair, that even without the Apollo bit, it already knew a lot of information about me. It probably didn't even need the Apollo bit.

01:21:26So it's now going to do that and it's now going to create the record. So now when I go into my contacts. Oh, no, look, a contact already exists. Let me grab the existing record to show you what's there before you decide what to do. So here we go. It's going to work out that there's already a record there. So, again, this is where the AI is great because it manages to work out what's going on. So it actually worked out that it should update the existing record rather than deleting it. And now when I go into here and I look at my contacts, I got today's contacts in here.

01:22:02Now let's just go to all. And let's just go. Let me just search for my email. There we go. And I should have a contact in here, which I do that one there and we can see here is my contact it's gone through it's updated information if I go into the timeline you can see all the details that it's just updated and you can see it's gone in and it's put in my lead sources web research it's put in my title put in my department it's put in my mailing city my other city and some other address information It's also added a description. Let's see what's put in the description.

01:22:44There we go. So founder of Limitless IT Consultancy since 2023. Zoho Consultant and Specialist. Previously here. Also founder of Student App Center. That's true. I do have a second company. Limitless is a Zoho partner offering subscription base. Yeah, it's filled out our information. Pretty good considering that we didn't have to do anything manually ourselves. And again, I'm doing this one at a time for demonstration purposes. I could ask it to do this a hundred at a time, a thousand at a time if I want. It will just work through it and that's really where the efficiency comes from.

01:23:17But let's also go one step further. Let's say create an invoice for Jake in Zaho Books for a thousand pounds for garden design services. And this will be a real test because I don't believe this contact will be in Zoho Books but we'll find out. So it's having a little look, it's looking for the Zoho Books organization. Again this is the first time we've asked it to work with Zoho Books so it might take a little bit longer because it needs to work out a couple of bits of information itself. Kind of like when you have a new employee, the first time you ask them to do something they're probably going to take a little bit longer about it as they get used to it.

01:23:59It's exactly the same thing when you're working with AI. The first time you do it it's going to take a bit longer because the AI needs to learn how it's doing things, what the process is. And then you can see invoice created. There you go. Same data hygiene issue as the CRM. The book's customer is named Test Test rather than Jake Harris. Only the email matches. Want me to rename and update it? Yeah, let's say update the details to match CRM and add the AT at 20%. perfect so we filled in that information hit send and it's now going to update that record details and do that so if we go into Zoho books and now go into our sales and our invoices we can see it's currently test test so it might not have updated just yet but you can see my garden design services are in here and if we go back into here oh it just needs me to allow it's just working out the org requires that details on the contact so it's just working out how to do that let me retry without specific that treatment so again it's just working through the problem it's working out what it needs to do first time it takes a little while as it's getting used to it.

01:25:29We are getting there. Perfect. Whilst we're working through this, does anybody have any questions? And then we'll start wrapping up for the day. I'd like to do possibly a full webinar running through the different things we can do with AI and Zoho. If that's something people would be interested in, let me know. And that's something we can get booked in because this is really just a starting point for what's possible. So if I refresh, here we go, because it's now updated the details and it's added VAT to the invoice as well. So makes a huge difference being able to do this because you can do things so quickly.

01:26:14But yeah, the reporting stuff we've spoken about as well. Just imagine if you're running the business and you want to know, let's see, how much have we invoiced this month? I'm just going to change that back to Sonic because I don't think we need anything more complex. It can look up that information. If you want to ask how much you've invoiced a specific person, you can do that. It's amazing at doing these different bits of, pulling these different bits of information together. And for me, this is now kind of the, this is the benefit to AI now.

01:26:51And actually it's the payoff from all the work of having a good CRM system and a good database is now all of this information that can be pulled out and used for these different things that we're doing. But yeah, you can see we've got some other examples here, some other reports I created earlier today as I was getting ready for this. Lots and lots of things you can do in here. But I think that brings us to the end of today's session. It is nearly 5.30, so I'm sure everybody is getting ready to go home for the day, at least everybody in the UK.

01:27:25If there's any other questions, please do share them or drop me an email. I'll be more than happy to answer them. If you're interested in talking more about how we could potentially help you get more from both Zoho and also what we're doing in the world of AI, let us know. We'll be more than happy to have a call with you, work out whether we could work together and how we might be able to help you do more. thank you for the message I will be sharing the recording after the fact as well so it'll be on the website probably be tomorrow morning now just because a bit later in the day but absolutely this will be this will be uploaded John looking forward to our call on Monday as well we'll run through all of this I'm sure it's going to add to my to-do list but that is absolutely not a problem thank you very much guys any other questions just let me know and just hang around for a couple of minutes in case there's any more.

01:28:17Oh, thank you, everybody. All very kind. Perfect. It looks like that's everything. So I will wrap up and I will speak to you all in our next webinar. Thank you, guys.