Is Your Business AI-Ready?
Events
7 min read
On 24th September 2026, Dotsquares hosted an afternoon of real conversations about how businesses are actually using Zoho, not the sales pitch version, but what it looks like when the system is running and people have things to say about it.
The idea behind the "Scale Smarter with Zoho" event was straightforward. Too many businesses are either using a fraction of what Zoho can do, or are still stitching together disconnected tools that do not talk to each other. Dotsquares wanted to get decision-makers in the same room, not for a product demonstration marathon, but for a genuine look at what connected business applications can do when they are set up properly.
The event brought together business owners, operations leaders, and people responsible for digital transformation decisions across their organisations. The format was deliberately kept focused and accessible, a couple of hours at Hobbs Court in London SE1, with enough time to actually absorb what was being discussed before moving into open conversation.
Dotsquares has been a Zoho partner for years, delivering Zoho development services across a wide range of business types, from SMEs getting their first CRM in place to larger organisations looking to consolidate multiple platforms under one roof. This event was a chance to bring some of that work into the open.
The event ran from 3:00 PM to 6:00 PM, with a structured agenda that moved through presentations, client talks, and then an open networking session. Here is how the afternoon was arranged:
Guests arrived and settled in, a chance to connect before the sessions began
Welcome note from Marketing Director Shilpi Chandra, followed by a presentation from Pranay Misra and Pradyumn Kapoor
Jeev Sahoo, Founder Director at Step8Up Academy, on how Zoho changed their operations
William Bell, Group COO at Bell and Company, sharing their Zoho experience from an operations perspective
A full hour for conversations, questions, and connecting with other attendees
One of the running themes across the session was the gap between what most businesses think Zoho is and what it actually does at full capability. A lot of organisations come in thinking CRM and leave having understood something much bigger, a unified platform where sales, finance, customer service, marketing, and analytics can all work from the same data, without the manual data transfers and mismatches that come from running everything separately.
The presentation from Pranay Misra and Pradyumn Kapoor walked through exactly this, how the Zoho ecosystem works when the applications are properly connected, and what that looks like in practice for a mid-size UK business trying to grow without adding headcount to manage the complexity of that growth.
Rather than working through slides about features, the demonstrations showed the applications running, CRM workflows, automation triggers, finance processes, and how Zoho's AI layer (Zia) sits across the platform to surface information and predictions the business would otherwise have to pull manually. The focus was on showing how these things connect, not on listing capabilities in isolation.
The two client sessions were the part of the afternoon most people found most useful, which is rarely a surprise, hearing from someone who has been through the implementation and is running the system day-to-day answers questions that no amount of product explanation can.
Jeev Sahoo from Step8Up Academy spoke about how the business uses Zoho to manage its student and client operations, the combination of CRM and automation that replaced what had been a largely manual tracking process. The specifics of their setup were genuinely instructive for others in the room dealing with similar challenges.
William Bell, Group COO at Bell and Company, brought an operations-level perspective, how Zoho fits into managing a multi-entity business, the finance and reporting side of things, and what the integration work actually involved before the system was running smoothly. The honest version of these implementation journeys, including the parts that take longer than expected, is what makes client sessions worth attending.
The Q&A that followed the client sessions produced some of the sharper questions of the afternoon, partly because the client talks had given people enough context to ask specific things rather than general ones. The open networking session from 5 PM was well-used, with plenty of follow-up conversations between attendees who had found relevant common ground during the earlier sessions.
For anyone who was not at the event or wants a quick reference on what was covered, here is the practical breakdown of how Zoho works across the core business areas discussed on the day.
Zoho CRM manages leads, contacts, deals, and sales pipelines with automation that handles follow-ups, task creation, and pipeline movement based on triggers rather than manual action. For a sales team spending time on admin rather than selling, the automation layer is usually where the most immediate time is recovered.
Zoho Books handles invoicing, expenses, reconciliation, and reporting. When it is connected to CRM, the sales-to-invoice process runs without anyone transferring data between systems, a deal closing in CRM can trigger an invoice in Books without anyone touching it. For multi-entity businesses like Bell and Company, the consolidated reporting across entities is where the real operational value sits.
Zoho Desk manages customer support tickets, routing, and resolution tracking. Zoho Analytics sits across the full platform and pulls data from every connected application into dashboards that give an accurate operational picture, without the spreadsheet exports and manual assembly that most businesses currently rely on for their reporting.
Zia, Zoho's AI assistant, works across the platform to flag anomalies, surface predictions, and automate routine analysis. In 2026, this includes more sophisticated workflow intelligence, identifying patterns in sales data, flagging at-risk customer relationships, and recommending next actions based on what has worked historically. It is not AI for the sake of it; it is AI that runs in the background of the tools people are already using.
Zoho Creator allows businesses to build custom applications on top of the Zoho platform without enterprise-level development cost. For businesses with specific workflows that off-the-shelf tools do not handle well, Creator is often the path to solving that without going outside the Zoho ecosystem. Working with experienced Zoho Creator Consultants can help businesses design applications that match their workflows and operational requirements. Dotsquares builds and extends these regularly as part of its Zoho development services offering.
Events like this work when the content is honest and the format gives people enough time to actually engage with what they are hearing. The London event on 24th September did both. Hearing directly from Jeev Sahoo and William Bell about how their businesses use Zoho, what works, what took time, and what they would do differently, gave the afternoon a practical grounding that product demonstrations alone cannot replicate.
If you were not at the event and want to explore what Zoho could do for your business, Dotsquares' Zoho development services team is available to walk through the options specific to your setup, whether you are new to Zoho or looking to get more from a system you already have. Dotsquares was also at Zoholics 2026 earlier in the year, and the conversations from both events are shaping how we approach Zoho projects going into 2027.
Dotsquares is a certified Zoho partner offering implementation, customisation, and development services across the full Zoho ecosystem. Talk to our team about where you are now and what a properly connected setup looks like for your business.
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