Zoho just updated Catalyst, its cloud development platform, with AI tools that go after a problem most developers already know firsthand. An AI assistant can write code in seconds. Getting that code actually deployed and running reliably in the cloud still eats up hours nobody budgeted for.
The update brings Agent Skills, a non-interactive command-line interface, Model Context Protocol support, and direct hooks into coding assistants like Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex. A developer keeps working inside whatever tool they already use, and Catalyst handles the cloud side underneath it, building, testing, deploying and scaling the generated code without anyone provisioning a server by hand.
Kehinde Ogundare, who heads Zoho Nigeria, put the problem plainly: AI coding tools have made writing applications faster, but developers still burn significant time stitching together separate cloud services and managing infrastructure themselves. Catalyst’s Agent Skills give AI assistants context about the platform’s architecture and recommended patterns, so the assistant sticks to sensible workflows instead of producing code that runs but doesn’t actually fit how the cloud setup expects things built. The new CLI lets assistants run multi-step cloud workflows on their own, and the MCP server means someone working in VS Code or Cursor can spin up a database table or add a column without ever opening the Catalyst console.
Zoho drew one line it won’t cross, though. Development and production stay on separate cloud environments, and code always needs manual promotion before it goes live, so AI agents never touch production directly. Audit trails, activity logs and collaborator controls track what happens across the platform, giving teams a clear record of what an agent actually did.
Zoho also open-sourced its AI skills repository, along with Catalyst’s SDK, CLI and Slyte JavaScript framework, so developers can inspect or extend the tools instead of trusting a black box. Pricing runs a monthly free tier, NGN192,500 in free credits over six months, pay-as-you-go billing, and a no-cost option for students building non-commercial projects.
More than 150 million users and over a million paying organizations already run on Zoho’s cloud products, all hosted in data centres the company owns rather than rents.
