Open-weight models, AI models whose parameters are made publicly available so anyone can download and run them for free, changed the economics of AI development almost overnight.
For in-house AI teams that had spent years building their own models, that shift raised a direct question: what are we actually here to do now?
At DevSparks 2026 in Bengaluru, a nationwide movement by YourStory focused on empowering India's developer ecosystem with next-generation technologies, Ramprakash Ramamoorthy, Director of AI Research at Zoho Corp, traced how Zoho Labs navigated that question, and why inference engineering became its answer.
Getting started and pivoting
Zoho Labs was set up to solve engineering problems that kept repeating across Zoho's portfolio of over 100 products.
