They serve different roles in a Zoho AI architecture. Zia Agents are pre-built or custom autonomous workers built inside Zoho’s ecosystem — digital employees that handle specific business functions like lead qualification, HR onboarding, or invoice processing. Zoho MCP is the connectivity layer that allows external AI systems (agents, LLMs, or custom tools your team already uses) to interact with Zoho data and actions. In practice: Zia Agents run natively inside Zoho; Zoho MCP is how you bring outside AI into Zoho. Many advanced Zoho implementations use both together.