Zoho working to avoid mass layoffs, freezes annual pay hikes: Vembu

Zoho, which employs over 19,000 people globally, will skip its usual annual pay increases this year as rising costs and an uncertain business outlook amid the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) weigh on the software-as-a-service (SaaS) industry.

“The business outlook for software is uncertain and AI has raised costs dramatically with a massive 4-fold increase in server prices which we need for data centers , AI usage increasing rapidly, leading to much higher expenses, which we are trying to control,” Zoho founder and Chief Scientist Sridhar Vembu said in a post on X.