Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley, CPA, CITP, CGMA, discuss the major announcements and strategic direction revealed at Zoho Day 2026, an analyst event attended by more than 100 industry experts from firms such as Gartner, IDC, and Forrester.
The Accounting Tech Lab is an ongoing series that explores the intersection of public accounting and technology.
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Transcript
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SPEAKERS
Randy Johnston, Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 00:00
Randy, welcome to the accounting Technology Lab, sponsored by CPA practice advisor, with your hosts, Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley,
Randy Johnston 00:12
one, welcome to the accounting Technology Lab. I’m your host, Randy Johnston, with co host Brian Tankersley, and we have an annual event that we attend that we want to report on for you, called Zoho day. Now in 2026 Zoho made significant announcements in their product platform, and I want to frame this first that I’ve recommended Zoho to small businesses for the better part of eight years and more, really, by the time we got to 2018 with Zoho one, they had so many modules and so many capabilities, but they really cured that even more in the past two years with their introduction of 50 state payroll here in the United States and their coverage in Canada. So clearly, innovation is going on inside the company. But you know, Brian was able to attend. Many of you know my wife’s health is not the best, and I actually chose to stay home with her for this event, even though I was booked and I canceled at the last minute on Zoho I was invited. So we have to count on Brian’s insights, and I do with the techniques that he used. So Brian, what would you like our listeners to know about Zoho Day this year?
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 01:27
Zoho day is the Davos of it’s the Davos for business technology is my, is my Cliff Notes to start out, it is an annual analyst meeting. We have over 100 analysts in the room. So you have multiple analysts from Gartner, IDC, Forrester, k2 slash, CPA, PA, with you and me when we’re there. You know, it’s
Randy Johnston 01:49
and Brian on that one. I did attend some of these sessions virtually, as you know, and I was actually quite fascinated, because they panned to you many times in the room. They did pan the entire room, and, you know, I knew a lot of the analysts that were there, but didn’t know some and, you know, got to hear a lot of the questions and so forth. So, you know, our for our friends and listeners that are in this, just note that there are a lot of very influential writers in the room, and a very lot of, yeah, that are very deep thinkers, exactly.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 02:24
I mean, you put somebody, you put the Kevin permanters of the world from IDC. You put the Gartner people. You put the forester people that do all of this enterprise stuff in a room. And you listen to everybody talk, and you talk to people at lunch and at dinner and at breakfast, you know, and you’re there for two days, and, boy, it’s an experience.
Randy Johnston 02:46
And you’re hurting my soul, missing this year too. Well, I will
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 02:49
tell you, it’s a very special meeting. It’s one of my favorite meetings the years in Austin, the 20/18, and 19th of February. And I’m going to let I lifted many of their slides out of the decks they use just to kind of talk you through the things they announced. There were many things that they talked about that I can’t talk about yet because I’m under embargo. Okay, so I want you to know that there are things, there are things that they’re doing, and as soon as I can talk about them, I will, but it’s going to be later in the year. So the thing, the interesting thing that happens here is that every year they have kind of a state of the market and a a discussion of where we are in our relationship with technology every year. And it’s a very holistic 30,000 foot or 70,000 foot view. You know, it’s the view from the Concord, okay? And, and they, they said that, you know, the next, we’re in the next phase of the evolution, you know. And again, if you think about, if you think about, you know, the if you think about where, what we’ve taken digital. We’ve taken mail and photos and books and GPS and maps and money, made them all digital. Okay, we are now getting to the stage where we can take a brain and we can make it digital. Now, is it? Is that brain as good as the human brain? No, but it is, but it is good enough. In many cases, the body, though, is also being abstracted. Okay? So we’re having robots. I mean, look at Elon Musk shutting down one of his plants in California to make robots as the way that they’re going to build they’re going to do the construction on Mars. It’s brilliant. Okay, so it’s, it’s interesting times. But again, so far, we’ve been digitizing things, but we’re now digitizing ourselves in this and so here’s the thing, when intelligence is programmable, it changes who captures value. So if you think about it, you know, if you are, if you have human beings that are, that are effectively training your your systems and AI regimes that you have, that AI regime. Team stays with the company. You know, it’s very much like, you know, accountants we’ve never had, you know, we generally don’t have these, these situations where we have to sign away all our inventions the way engineers do. But we really are entering into that space now where, you know, the the training that we do is going to accrue to the benefit of the organization that sponsors it, and it will be their asset that they can share with others. Again, we that we’ve the tool providers have focused on digital productivity, but we’re moving toward outcomes. Okay? So we’re moving from productivity instruments to to execution. Instruments. Best example here, Claude, Claude and Claude code, and the Claude add in that will do things on your local computer. Okay, you know, that’s the reason Claude is getting all this buzz, is because it is going out and touching things that have never been, we’ve never been able to touch before, and it’s been a, it’s been a very big deal, you know, again, very much like self driving cars. You know, if you’ve ridden in one of the self driving cars that that doesn’t even have a steering wheel, or, you know, some of the self driving taxis they have in major cities, there’s a difference in let me drive and drive and drive me around. You know, again, and if you think about, if you think about the super wealthy in the world. They don’t drive their own cars. Most of them, you know, the plutocrats, they have, they have a driver that waits for them, meets them at the front door, and they go to the next place. Okay? So it’s really, really different here. Now, when we look at software, we have software where we had to write code in the past. And, you know, we had a previous episode on on vibe coding. And I will tell you that Zoho Zoho, Zoho, CEO and major stockholder, Sridhar vendu, actually, was was pretty amazing in some of the things. He said that the future of software engineering is going to be very different than it has been historically, you know. And we’ve heard that also from from Jeff the founder of digits, when he came on our podcast where, you know, 100% of the code that he’s creating is originally generated by AI now. And so the the thing that I would say to you here is that is that people like you and me that are that are business and people like me that’s a business analyst, more the business analyst than a programmer, although I’m getting pretty good at vibe coding, I will say that people like us can now that understand the business problems, can now solve our own problems with the right methodologies and the right tools, and create our own tools to solve our problems. And Zoho has been a leader in this with many of their robotic process automation tools and things like this. They also have a they have a self service Zoho MPC with MCP model context protocol and and you can literally go through the schema of Zoho one, the database schema in every application. And you can create your own MCP. They’re limited to 200 fields, but you can create your own multiple MCPS as part of the price that will connect up to your to your AI engines. So it’s a
Randy Johnston 08:23
brand to your point here it. You know, we have recommended to firms in the past that they use the Zoho Creator module to create custom apps for their firm. That was a good solution in the day. But this new methodology with Vibe coding and solutions, I believe many of our listeners can do this. In fact, this week, I was pleased to hear a CPA who listens to the podcast regularly walk up to me and say, let me show you what I created in vibe coding. And I listened to your vibe coding episode. And thank you to him. And as it turns out, note friends that this is another of the vendors who have announced MCPS this year, among those Acumatica and NetSuite and Zoho and and, and so we think that there will be few platforms that don’t have MCPS by the end of the year, and when you take zoho’s privacy profile and expose their content through MCPS, you can make all sorts of queries with AI that wind up being a better way to do things, and you don’t need as many reporting tools in my new way of thinking about this. So Brian, sorry to interrupt your train of thought, but I wanted to make sure our listeners really were thinking about how important it is to have MCPS number one, to have five coding number two and number three, that zo has been doing this stuff for a. 10 plus years with Zoho Creator, yeah, yeah.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 10:03
And they did, they did. They’ve done a lot of work in the background. They announced a new server platform, they announced a they announced a database engine that they’ve been working on for 12 years that are extensions to Postgres, and they’re very active in the postgres open source project. They talked about their data centers quite a bit. You know, they really are working hard to create a stack that is a worthy competitor to many, not all, but many of the functions of an AWS and an Azure. And it’s, it’s very interesting, you know, I have so who’s telephony and zoho’s payments set up right now, on, on a on, on Zoho CRM, and I, and I will tell you that it is amazing to be able to just click on, click on somebody’s record in CRM, have it initiate the call through a business phone line. And I don’t have to give up my my mobile phone number for it. You know, it’s, it’s a simple thing, but it’s, it’s very it increases effectively, significantly. So again, the focus here, though, again, is changing from increasing productivity to delivering outcomes, so making the problem go away. And so they’re saying that it’s going to create, it’s going to require shifts in thinking, platforms, architecture and business models. Okay, one of the things they’ve changed very similar to the transition that Apple made a few years ago, where they created an app environment for the Mac that is, that is similar to the one for iOS, where you have an app store and you can you and that’s where you get all your apps for your Mac. Zoho announced an app OS that is a shared data foundation, that is an app platform that runs in the web on Zoho. You know, I, I’ve frankly, been surprised at this point that Zoho hasn’t come out with a Chromebook similar device, or, you know, maybe a firmware for Chromebooks that will change them from being focused on Google to being focused having the privacy that Zoho has. But again, it’s this app. OS is one shared data foundation with common business and process models built in workflows. You have identity, permissions and governance in here, in a stack that is controlled by one player. So you don’t, you don’t you have one throat to choke. The apps are built inside the platform, and they’re positioned above the infrastructure and below the applications. Okay, so here is the staff. Here is the stack of how they’re laying this out. And again, you can see with this app, OS, it’s going to sit in here, above the cloud infrastructure, but below the Zoho apps. So you can make things that fit together. Now, what does this mean? This means that the fact that I can make that call out of CRM, and I can I can have Zoho I can have Zoho books set up. Who says I can’t create a tool and creator that will look up the customers. I need to call, create a list in Zoho CRM, and then I hit a button and call them with Zoho telephony, you know, it’s, it’s a, there are all kinds, you know. And by the way, I can make, I can do that to my personal, bespoke requirements, and I can make it work so it’s a it’s a big deal data structure, the same way business rules run, the same way the teams control the apps, but you still have centrally enforced standards. You can have apps that are written, that are written with AI code Gen. You can modify it and have custom apps. Or you can let the AI code create it. You can let the AI code create it, and go from there and still run it on App. OS, okay. It lets you turn the platform into real software. You can define data, models, workflows, permissions. It generates app application codes, APIs and services, and the code actually matches how the system works. So it again, creates a lot of things in here. Now this matters, because everything comes from the same foundation. Rules are enforced automatically. They don’t drift over time. Change doesn’t create a new message here. The business impact is that is that you now can create and solve real outcomes. You have a level playing field for developers in this and you can rapidly innovate and iterate and go through many different things. Again, Apple. Apple s is not a point solution. It’s not integrates integration layer. It’s not a vertical SAS suite, but it is a business application. OS, okay, now when we when we look at the other things they talked about, well, Randy, what’s, what’s your take on this? And let’s get some insights from here.
Randy Johnston 14:27
No, I appreciate I was actually letting you roll, because I know there’s so much to cover here, but this idea of being able to have a building platform, which I’m going to go back to the security piece, Brian, if I’m thinking it through, right? You know, simplifying the way you can build an app with this and in effect, enable you to create something new with much less effort. That’s the way I kind of read that. That’s kind of a big deal. Now we will continue throughout 2026 and beyond, to teach you how you can become more self servicing as your own firm. And not that I want you to build watches, but in some cases, there is no watch available that fits your needs. And if we can get differentiation for you and your clients. This way, I’m a happy camper, but
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 15:25
remember though that that many times people that have bespoke needs, like Navy divers and others, you know, the military hat goes out and says, This is what I need the watch to do, and this is the conditions I needed to operate under, and this is the reliability that I need, and they do create a bespoke watch for this, okay? And the beautiful part about this is this is very much like a 3d printer for applications, where you can, you can go in and basically get the AI to process this, and it can do things that required a lot of effort and other things in the past,
Randy Johnston 16:01
and you know what I’m listening to on this? Brian is many vendors who have platforms watch what is being built, then they negotiate with the builder, they don’t steal the intellectual property, but then they build and deliver an app like that, because they just can’t think of all the needs. And actually, after my board meetings yesterday, I was talking with another board member who was discussing how they were using dynamics 365 and how they’d had all this custom application integration done, and then how Microsoft had updated the platform and broken it all, and they were three days into their recovery. But the key point here is that what they built, they were going to try to the company was going to try to sell separately as a new module for a special vertical industry. And I’m listening to this thinking, yep, that makes perfect sense. That’s how a lot of third party apps were built. But, you know, notice that in this case, they want to put it inside the platform. So to me, this is a big platform play.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 17:12
Yeah, yeah. And I will tell you that there are many, many other things that they talked about during our time here. You know, you mentioned the 50 state payroll historically. You know when? When they said, when they said they were going to do 50 state payroll? About a year or two ago, I reminded them my maxim that 50 state payroll in the United States is very much like Afghanistan. It’s where empires go to die. And what happens is they get mired in quagmires with different states and other things, and it’s just very difficult to push through and make it happen. And they, of course, made liars out of me with their What 11,000 engineers they have, or something insane, and they just went out and made it happen in a year. So it’s been pretty amazing
Randy Johnston 17:51
well, and Brian, that’s kind of like the Zoho start, you know, where they have started, this automatic business formation. You and I used that recently in their platform, and I have noted that several other vendors are now attempting to work with more of the states on automation. In a separate episode, we’ll talk about the AICPA accelerator program and how one of the new sales tax vendors is doing a whole bunch of this automation at very, very low cost, because they realized how painful it was for you as accounting professionals to deal with all of these federal, state and local government interfaces and interchanges.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 18:38
Yeah, yeah. And it’s, I will say that it’s very interesting. Some of the things they’ve they’ve done in other markets. For example, in India, they’ve announced a Zoho ERP, and they are flat taking on people that are refugees from SAP and other platforms. And it’s a, it’s a very, very interesting thing. Now, it’s just in India right now. We expect that they will eventually come to the United States, but we don’t know when that’s going to be. And, you know, with any kind of startup like this, you don’t want to get ahead of them, because the plans can change at any moment. But that’s that’s very, very interesting. The Zoho payments is also very interesting. You know, you know, you and I have a venture we’re working on, and we’ve actually hooked up Zoho payments to it, you know, we’ve, we’ve really, you know, they’re, they’re really adapting and changing this quite a bit, and it’s, it’s a very interesting space that We’re living in here, you know the, you know they’re, they really have, they have honestly gone in and and really innovated in a huge way. And they have gone in and, you know, we’re, we’re living in very interesting times. And you. Know, I’m, I’m glad, you know, it’s, it’s always amazing, you know, you look at the things that Raju Raju vezna, that we talked to, always has, and the things that Sridhar vimbu always has, you know, and it’s, it’s, again, one of my favorite meetings every year, because I get to be around a lot of really smart people, and I get to see the world differently, okay, because they don’t have the same, the same rearing and the same, the same values that we do, and they come at the world from a completely different angle. And so it’s a it’s, it’s always fascinating to go there, because I always learn new things, and I think about things differently after I’ve been there. And so it’s, it’s always a good time. So what’s what you know, in wrapping up Randy, that’s, that’s the, those are the major topics I plan to cover. You know, what’s your take on this? And where do you think? Where do you think we go? You know, what do you think it looks like going forward here?
Randy Johnston 21:05
Well, Brian, here, I’m going to be a pontificating just a little bit, because first, I like the Zoho company and their strategies. You know, I’ve been dealing with the executive leadership for around 30 years, and got started very early on their CRM. And of course, we use their CRM as k2 and you and I are using Zoho in our new venture startup. And so I mean to us, it’s a great platform, number one, number and
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 21:36
I will tell you that the tools are amazing and the integrations are amazing because I’ve personally configured most of that environment. Yeah.
Randy Johnston 21:45
And as it turns out, you know, the the numbers vary a little bit, but there’s 50 plus, so 55 or 60 different modules in there. So it’s way more broad than you might think. So, you know, it’s like you’ve got Lego box given to you, and you put them together any way you’d like. So sometimes it takes a little bit more on the learning curve with the company, but the people behind it are sincere. They’re hard working, they’re innovative, they’re thoughtful, they try to do the right thing all the time. And you know, we see so many companies that just are underfunded or over promising. And as a rule of thumb, Zoho under promises and over delivers. And you know, that’s one thing that I’ve enjoyed about working with the platform and the company for so long. So there are a lot of things in the pipeline. Again, you and I know quite a number of things under non disclosure here, we do encourage our listeners to participate in their accountants program@zoho.com slash CPA. We think it is one of the more viable platforms to be associated with. And we let me ask if you’re an Intuit partner or zero partner, but this is a good partner.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 23:06
Let me say this, though, for your super small clients, there are free versions of just about everything for really small startups. So Zoho invoice is free for everybody forever. Okay? So if you have somebody that needs to build their lawn service, and they’re a startup. Zoho invoice is free forever. Zoho expense has a free tier that goes up to, I think, five users you have, you have a lot of tools in their space that are free up to a certain limit. And so I would encourage you to check that out, especially for your startups that are capital constrained. You know those people that you know that they have been on the wrong end of pink slips and been downsized in the last in the last few years and decided that there is no job for them in corporate America anymore, and they have to go make something or they have a passion project that they want to pursue. I would encourage you to take a look at Zoho. And in particular Zoho one, they’re all in one thing that includes everything, including a meeting platform and everything you can imagine. It’s, it’s a, you know, it’s, it’s a very interesting company. And they, they really, we really impressed with, yeah,
Randy Johnston 24:15
I appreciate that. In fact, as you were saying, I was thinking that, you know, I did get to see my daughter, Mary, who’s working the outsiders on Broadway, and son in law, Curtis this week, and they’re using Zoho expense to track all of their expenses related to their Broadway work. It’s it made their life so much easier. Well, Brian, thank you for sharing your experience with Zoho day and all of our listeners. We appreciate you stepping in every week with us. We’ll be with you for another accounting Technology Lab in the next week. Good day.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 24:49
Thank you for sharing your time with us. We’ll be back next Saturday with a new episode of the technology lab from CPA practice advisor. Have a great week.
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