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The National
an hour ago
- The National
Federal Reserve meeting: If not now, then when?
The Federal Reserve enters this week facing relentless pressure from the White House, mixed economic data and continued uncertainty. Yet, in the face of it all, the US central bank is expected to hold rates steady once more. The meeting comes less than a week after President Donald Trump's tour of the Fed headquarters, where he and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell publicly bickered over the renovation project's costs. But with Mr Trump on holiday in Scotland, focus now shifts towards the Fed's interest rates. Mr Powell had acknowledged the bank would have cut rates by now were it not for Mr Trump's tariffs, which have put the global economy on edge since his announcement on April 2. The President's harsher 'reciprocal tariffs' are due to take effect on Friday. Meanwhile, recent data shows that other charges are beginning to be passed on to consumers. The Labour Department's Consumer Price Index (CPI) report showed that inflation rose to 2.7 per cent annually in June. Everyday goods such as toys, household appliances and clothing also saw price increases. Citing uncertainty surrounding tariffs and the current inflation level above its 2 per cent target, most Fed officials are signalling they will keep their target range level for a fifth consecutive meeting at 4.25 to 4.50 per cent. The UAE Central Bank, which mirrors Fed decisions due to the dollar peg, would also be expected to hold rates at 4.4 per cent following the US central bank's announcement. Path forward According to the Fed's projections from June, it still expects to cut rates twice this year to bring its target level to around 3.9 per cent. But with the central bank likely to hold interest rates at this meeting and only three left on the calendar this year, the window to cut is closing. 'We're simply taking some time,' Mr Powell said during a panel discussion in Portugal at the start of July. Mr Powell has practised extreme caution towards cutting rates this year, afraid that moving too soon or too quickly could lead to a renewed spike in prices not long after the most recent inflationary surge, with CPI inflation peaking at 9.1 per cent in 2022. 'When you get through an inflation episode like that, by the skin of their teeth, they're going to be really careful about anything that looks inflationary from now on,' said Derek Tang, an economist at LHMeyer/Monetary Policy Analytics in Washington. Traders anticipate the Fed will resume cutting rates in September, before reductions in October and December, according to CME Group data. A deluge of economic data this week should also give Fed officials greater clarity on the direction of the economy. When you get through an inflation episode like that, by the skin of their teeth, they're going to be really careful about anything that looks inflationary from now on Derek Tang, economist at LHMeyer / Monetary Policy Analytics The Labour Department will provide fresh insight into the health of the labour market with the Job Openings and Labour Turnover Survey on Tuesday and the June unemployment report on Friday. The government will also report on second-quarter GDP hours before the Fed rate announcement. US economic activity contracted by 0.5 per cent in the first quarter, but economists note that was due to a surge of imports as business rushed to get ahead of tariffs. The Fed's preferred inflation metric – Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index – for June is also due to be released on Thursday. Fed divisions Not everyone might be on board with the committee's decision this time. Public remarks indicate a growing division inside the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee. Fed Governor Christopher Waller, who holds a permanent vote on the rate-setting committee, laid out his case for a quarter-point cut earlier this month. Speaking in New York, he said the Fed should not wait for further weakening in the labour market to act. 'With inflation near target and the upside risks to inflation limited, we should not wait until the labour market deteriorates before we cut the policy rate,' he said. US job growth was more solid than expected in June, although most of those gains occurred in the government sector. At the same time, the unemployment rate has remained steady around 4.1 per cent. Dissents among FOMC members are rare. Under Mr Powell's stewardship, only 3 per cent of dissents have come from a Fed governor. 'I'm sure it'll get a lot of attention,' said David Wilcox, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and director of US economic research at Bloomberg Economics. However, he argued such disagreements could guard against groupthink. Fed Vice Chair for Supervision Michelle Bowman could join Mr Waller's dissent after she voiced her own support for a rate cut this month. It would be the first time two Fed governors dissented on a rate move since 2002, when Alan Greenspan was in charge of the central bank. Mr Wilcox, a former staff member of the Federal Reserve Board, expects Mr Powell to acknowledge there could be a case to cut rates this week but that a majority of officials favour holding them steady. 'And he'll lay out the rationale for why that is,' he said. What will Trump say? Looming against this backdrop is Mr Trump, who softened his stance on Mr Powell last week after touring the Fed's headquarters. Those attacks have ranged from calling the Fed Chair a 'numbskull' to at times publicly considering whether he should fire him. But last week's tour offered some relief for Mr Powell after Mr Trump said he did not think the unprecedented move is necessary. 'I think we had a very good meeting on interest rates. And [Mr Powell] said to me … very strongly, the country is doing well,' Mr Trump told reporters after touring the Fed. 'I got that to mean that I think he's going to start recommending lower rates.' Mr Powell has sometimes cited the economy's strength as a reason not to move on rates. The President's holiday in Scotland could give the Federal Reserve some breathing room for now, although Mr Trump has proven he can dictate the news cycle and gyrate financial markets with a push of a button.
Zawya
an hour ago
- Zawya
Zoho Launches Zia LLM and Deepens AI Portfolio with Prebuilt Agents, Custom Agent Builder, MCP, and Marketplace
Homegrown, Business-Optimized Technology Addresses Needs for Developers and End Users While Enhancing Platform Capabilities SINGAPORE - Media OutReach Newswire - 28 July 2025 - Zoho Corporation, a global technology company, announced additional investments and offerings in AI, including Zia LLM, a proprietary large language model; Zia Agents, with 25+ ready-to-deploy AI-powered agents available in Agent Marketplace; Zia Agent Studio, a no-code agent builder; and a model context protocol (MCP) server to open up Zoho's vast library of actions to third-party agents. These capabilities and investments are designed to help organizations fully realize and maximize the value of contextual, assistive and agentic AI technology. Immediately impacting daily workflows for diverse roles and use cases, Zoho's latest AI developments deliver operational and financial efficiencies across entire organizations. "Zia LLM is a unique Enterprise LLM, this investment furthers Zoho's longstanding aim to build foundational technology focused on protection of customer data, breadth and depth of capabilities, and value," says Gibu Mathew, VP and GM of Zoho APAC. "Because Zoho's AI initiatives are developed internally, we are able to provide customers with cutting-edge tool sets without compromising data privacy and organizational flexibility, democratizing the latest technology on a global scale. For businesses, AI needs data integration at a DNA level, the Zoho platform is built with exactly that future and vision." Zia LLM, Built from the Ground Up and Optimized for Business Zoho has launched its own large language model, Zia LLM, built completely in-house by leveraging NVIDIA's AI accelerated computing platform. Trained with Zoho product use cases in mind—ranging from structured data extraction, summarization, RAG, and code generation—Zia LLM is comprised of three models with 1.3 billion, 2.6 billion and 7 billion parameters, each separately trained and optimized for contextual applicability that benchmark competitively against comparable open source models in the market. The three models allow Zoho to always optimize the right model for the right user context, striking the proper balance between power and resource management. This focus on right-sizing the model is an ongoing development strategy for Zoho. In addition to Zia LLM, Zoho is announcing two proprietary Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models for speech-to-text conversion for both English and Hindi. Optimized to perform on a low computer load without compromising on accuracy, the models benchmark up to 75% better than comparable models across standard tests. Language support for additional languages will be coming in the future. While Zoho supports many LLM integrations for users, including ChatGPT, Llama, and DeepSeek, Zia LLM continues Zoho's commitment to data privacy by allowing customers to keep their data on Zoho servers, leveraging the latest AI capabilities without sending their data to AI cloud providers. Zia LLM will be deployed across Zoho's data centers in the US, India, and Europe. The model is currently testing for internal use cases across Zoho's broad app portfolio, and will be available for customer use in coming months. Effective Native AI Agents Ready for Use To enable immediate adoption of agentic technology, Zoho has developed a roster of AI agents contextually baked right into its products. These agents can be used across various business activities, handling relevant actions based on real-life organizational roles (including sales development, customer support, and account management). Agents available today include: New Version of Ask Zia: The latest version of Zoho's platform-wide conversational AI assistant, Ask Zia 's new BI skills are tailored to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists, yet supports any user within an organization. Ask Zia is now equipped with capabilities that directly address the unique pain points faced by each persona, whether it's building end-to-end data pipelines for engineers, analyzing data, creating reports and dashboards in an interactive conversation mode for analysts, or helping to jump start building ML models for data scientists. Customer Service Agent: With the ability to process incoming customer requests, understand the context behind them, and either answer them directly or triage them to a human rep, the Customer Service Agent for Zoho Desk provides an efficient yet reliable first line of assistance, paving the way for quicker responses and resolutions. AI Agent Studio and Marketplace First announced earlier in 2025, Zoho has further simplified the Zia Agent Studio experience to be fully prompt-based (with the option to use low-code) and include ready-made access to over 700 actions across Zoho's products. Agents built by users can be deployed autonomously, triggered through button click or rule-based automation, or summoned within customer conversations. At the time of deployment, an agent can also be provisioned as a digital employee. Digital Employees respect defined user access permissions, maintaining the same permissions structures already defined within the organization. Admins are able to perform behavioral audits as well as performance and impact analyses on Digital Employees, ensuring that every agent is working as effectively as possible and within clear guardrails. Zoho Marketplace, which supplies over 2500 reliable extensions and integrations for Zoho users, now houses the Agent Marketplace, a dedicated section for AI agents that can be deployed by customers quickly. Ecosystem partners, ISVs, and individual developers will soon be able to create agents and host them on the Zia Agents Marketplace, further simplifying the adoption of agentic technology by organizations. Some pre-built agents created with Zia Agent Studio (and available on the Zia Agent Marketplace) are: Revenue Growth Specialist: Uncovers opportunities for upsell and cross-sell across existing customers, recommending the best marketing approach for each customer. Deal Analyzer: Analyze deals and provide insights such as win probability, next best action, and follow-up suggestions. Candidate Screener: Intelligently identifies and ranks the most suitable candidates for a specific job opening based on role requirements, skills, experience, and other key attributes. Zoho will continue to add more pre-built agents to the Agent Marketplace over time to cover several valuable core and utility use cases across various business functions. The full list of available agents can be found under Additional Documentation. With over 55 applications across one ecosystem, users can build agents to meet their organization's every need, no matter how specific. With Zia Agent Studio, Zoho users have access to the same tools as Zoho's developers, ensuring that any agent a customer dreams of can be created with ease. Interoperability with MCP Zoho has adopted the model context protocol (MCP), offering its own MCP server with a rich action library across several applications, allowing any MCP client to tap into data and actions from various Zoho apps while respecting the customer's defined permission structures. Zoho's MCP server has a library of actions from more than 15 Zoho applications exposed during Early Access. With Zoho Flow, third party tools are also exposed. Additional Zoho applications will be onboarded in the coming months. Furthermore, Zoho Analytics now offers support for a local MCP server. Roadmap In the short term, Zoho will regularly scale Zia LLM's model sizes, starting with the first of several planned parameter increases by the end of 2025. Future planned releases include expanding the available languages used by the speech-to-text model, beginning with languages spoken primarily across Europe and India, as well as the introduction of a reasoning language model (RLM). Additional skills will be added to Ask Zia, allowing it to act as an assistant to Finance teams and Customer Support teams, with more skills added in the future. Support for the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol will be implemented, allowing for Zia Agents to interact and collaborate with each other, as well as collaborate with agents on other platforms. Additional Documentation Zia Agent Marketplace - Full list of available agents at launch Disclaimer All trademarks, product names, and company names cited herein are the property of their respective owners. Availability and Pricing Zia LLM will be available to Zoho customers in the coming months. Zia Agents, Zia Agent Studio, Agent Marketplace, and Zoho MCP Server are being rolled out to customers who are currently on the early access waiting list. General availability for these offerings is expected towards the end of 2025. Zoho expects to study the usage patterns of these customers across use cases, industries, geographical regions, and sizes during this early access phase. A pricing structure for these offerings can be expected at the time of general availability. Zoho Artificial Intelligence Differentiation Zoho is committed to designing and incorporating artificial intelligence guided by the principles of customer privacy and value. Our generic AI models across contextual, assistive, and agentic AI, are not trained on consumer data and do not retain customer information. Zoho builds AI tools with usefulness in mind, striking a balance between providing AI technology that assists workers while right-sizing models that don't require burdening consumers with additional costs. Hashtag: #zoho The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement. About Zoho With 55+ apps in nearly every major business category, Zoho Corporation is one of the world's most prolific technology companies. Zoho is privately held and profitable with more than 18,000 employees globally with headquarters in Austin, Texas and international headquarters in Chennai, India. Zoho APAC HQ is located in Singapore. For more information, please visit: Zoho respects user privacy and does not have an ad-revenue model in any part of its business, including its free products. The company owns and operates its data centers, ensuring complete oversight of customer data, privacy, and security. More than 100 million users around the world, across hundreds of thousands of companies, rely on Zoho everyday to run their businesses, including Zoho itself. For more information, please visit: Zoho Corporation
Tahawul Tech
3 hours ago
- Tahawul Tech
AppleCare One Archives
Governments around the world are already realising that private AI cannot be built on public cloud monopolies. Digital identity and agent oversight need to be open and transparent, not hidden, ad hoc, or opaque, says Sergio Gago Huerta, CTO at Cloudera.
