Zoho CRM has added two new ways for your team to get help from AI agents without leaving their day-to-day screens: an Agent Switcher for chatting with any agent from anywhere in the CRM, and the option to place an agent directly on a record so it can act on that record's own data.
Picking an Agent to Chat With: The Agent Switcher
The Agent Switcher shows every conversational agent a given user has access to, whether that's one of Zia's own built-in agents (Module Insights, How-to, and Customization) or a custom agent your organisation has set up. It's available from the Ask Zia panel, and also directly from the Agents tab on the left side of the CRM.
Selecting an agent opens a chat where you can type a plain-language request and get a reply based on that agent's own instructions and tools. Users can switch to a different agent, or start a fresh conversation, from the same dropdown at any point.
What this changes for admins and users
- Which agents appear is controlled by profile, so a user only sees the agents an admin has actually granted to their profile rather than a full list of everything the organisation has built.
- A sensitive or expensive-to-run agent can be limited to a specific profile, such as Sales Admins, while a simpler general-purpose agent stays open to the whole team.
- One agent can be granted to several profiles at once, or different agents given to different departments, all through standard profile settings rather than configuring access person by person.
- If an agent connects using the requesting user's own login (a Logged in User connection), each person's questions are answered against their own records. Two reps on the same profile asking about their meetings today each see their own, not each other's.
- Users never need to touch deployment settings, modules, or configuration screens. They simply open the switcher and choose an agent.
In a real CRM setup, this typically plays out as: sales reps seeing an SDR or deal follow-up assistant, sales managers seeing coaching or forecasting agents, marketing seeing campaign and lead-qualification agents, and support seeing case summarisation or how-to agents, all from the same panel.
Note: The switcher only shows conversational agents. Agents that require specific record data supplied on-trigger don't appear here, since they're designed to run via an Autonomous Trigger or a Custom Button instead. An agent also doesn't need to be deployed to a particular module to show up in the switcher; being granted to a profile is sufficient. For Logged in User connections, the first time someone other than the original deployer uses the agent, they'll be prompted with a one-time authorisation step before it starts running against their own data.
Putting an Agent Directly on a Record
The second addition lets you add a Zia Agent as a related list on a record's detail page, so its suggestions are grounded in that exact record and visible without navigating away.
A practical example: if you've built a Discount Suggestion agent around your company's actual discount policy, adding it as a related list on the Deals module means a rep negotiating a discount can open that related list while sitting on the Deal record and get a policy-consistent suggestion immediately, rather than pausing the conversation to check elsewhere.
Once added, the agent behaves like any other related list on the page:
- It can be hidden from view when not needed
- Its position among other related lists can be reordered
- Its configuration can be edited
- It can be removed from the related list entirely
You can also manually refresh the agent's insights on a record, which is useful if you're revisiting a record after some time and want an updated take rather than the original one.
Need help? 1 Cloud Consultants can help you set up profile-based agent access through the Agent Switcher and add record-level agents to your Zoho CRM modules.
Book a discovery call with 1 Cloud Consultants, Zoho AI Consultancy Dublin.