Why Hire Employees When You Can Now Upload Them? ASEAN Foresees Agentic AI Colleagues

ManageEngine, the enterprise IT management division of Zoho Corporation, held a media briefing ahead of their 2025 UserConf Southeast Asia in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Arun Kumar, Regional Director for APAC at ManageEngine, outlined the company’s focus on supporting Asia’s digital future through cloud adoption, Artificial Intelligence (AI) integration, and stronger cyber resilience.

At the briefing, Kumar emphasised the world’s reliance on and prioritisation of cybersecurity and data privacy in recent years, since the leap into tech adoption had been fast-tracked. The global COVID pandemic forever changed how we work, since finding out how further IT adoption ensures productivity regardless of physical presence or location.

The Fast-Tracked Adoption of New Technology Leading Us into the AI Era

ManageEngine and Zoho had not been sitting idle during this shift. From 2002 till now, ManageEngine’s portfolio has grown to 60+ products with a focus on security and data privacy. Also, after recording a 30% growth in cloud adoption across ASEAN, their data centres have grown to over 80+ globally—and they are planning to build more ahead of their new launches earlier this year.

Earlier, around February this year, ManageEngine’s parent corporation—Zoho—launched their Agentic AI products, notably Zia Agents and Zia Agent Studios, which are the next evolution in the era of AI. While previous AI products have proven effective in contextual, conversational, and even analytical settings such as “Ask Zia,” they still require a person at the helm for prompts and taking initial action. Before Agentic AI, LLMs and Gen AI were indeed smart tools but tools nonetheless.

Agentic AI such as Zia Agents behaves more like a smart bot to handle menial but necessary tasks and actions. Zia Agents can be trained and fine-tuned towards your department’s operations and, soon after, begin handling tasks such as sales nurturing, marketing campaigns through emails or social media, or even admin/HR processes such as making purchase orders. All can be done by Zia Agents without any intervention required. According to ManageEngine and Zoho’s own site wording, Zia Agents can be thought of as ‘your sidekick for all the heroics.”

How Can We Trust AI Bots to Work and Act on Their Own with Our Private Data?

Of course, ManageEngine and Zoho are extremely clear on the potential concerns and trust issues of allowing AI to handle and act upon confidential data within companies. Not only are users still able to have full control over their involvement and supervision on tasks given to Zia Agents, but also rest assured of ManageEngine and Zoho’s rigid security and data privacy policies and countermeasures.

Kumar was inevitably asked the question: What safeguards and measures are in place to ensure that companies actually trust delegating workloads and tasks to Zia Agents?

His answer:

“If you look at the AI [developments] approaching and what we do today—it’s completely built by scratch. So, the AI functionalities are based on the datasets we trained… and this resides within our own data centres. This resides within Zoho.

So, we don’t expose any personal data or public data because, as a company, the commitment we give to our customers is a data privacy-first approach when it comes to building technology.

When the entire software cycle development happens, there’s a security-first approach. We build our products, and when it comes to data privacy—running it on our own data centres, managing the datasets, giving a commitment that the data won’t be used for any other purposes—all the commitment we look at gives customers how our capabilities can be more secure, how their data can be more private.”