Global technology company Zoho Corporation has announced major enhancements to Catalyst by Zoho, its Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), which it says brings agentic development capabilities directly into the coding environments developers use.

The additions include Agent Skills, a non-interactive command-line interface (CLI), and model context protocol (MCP) support, alongside integrations for agentic AI coding assistants including Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex. Zoho also announced that Catalyst will be available free of charge for students developing non-commercial applications, giving them access to full-stack hosting, functions, database and AI tooling without requiring a subscription or any payment.

The company explains that its PaaS bridges the gap between code generation and reliable deployment by giving agentic AI coding assistants a structured way to build and deploy applications. Developers can use the AI coding assistants of their choice while Catalyst provides the underlying full-stack serverless infrastructure and controls, reducing the need to stitch together multiple cloud services and vendors. This helps simplify development and future iterations while reducing operational complexity.

The platform is built for system integrators and software firms building custom solutions, as well as independent developers looking to move from prototype to production without managing infrastructure themselves. 

“In a very short period of time, AI coding assistants have transformed how quickly applications can be created, but moving that code into production reliably remains a challenge,” said  Zoho South Africa regional head Andrew Bourne. “Developers still spend significant time managing infrastructure and bringing together separate cloud services. With Catalyst, we are reducing that friction by providing an agent-ready, serverless full-stack platform that helps developers build, deploy and scale intelligent applications with greater control and less operational overhead.” 

"By removing the cost barrier and giving students access to full-stack development and AI capabilities, we want to enable them to experiment, build practical skills and turn their ideas into working applications," added Bourne. 

Catalyst Agent Skills gives coding assistants the context needed to understand Catalyst services, architecture and recommended development patterns. Instead of leaving the model to determine how the platform should be used, Agent Skills guides the assistant towards the appropriate capabilities and workflows, helping generate more accurate and verified output. 

The non-interactive CLI allows AI coding assistants to execute multi-step workflows in Catalyst from start to finish without requiring human input at every stage, reducing manual intervention and helping developers move faster from coding to deployment. 

The Catalyst MCP server gives AI coding assistants direct access to Catalyst capabilities from developers’ existing environments. Tasks such as creating a database table or adding a column can be performed from VS Code, Claude Code, Cursor or other AI Integrated Development Environments without switching to the Catalyst console. 

Orchestration built into Agent Skills connects these capabilities, deterministically routing requests through the appropriate CLI or MCP path. This aims to reduce the risk of incorrect tool selection and helps developers produce more reliable, production-ready applications. 

Zoho has made the AI skills available as an open-source repository for developers to be able to inspect and to enable further additions. Zoho is also open-sourcing Catalyst's software development kit CLI, as well as its lightweight Javascript Framework, Slyte. 

The company asserts that it keeps human oversight within the deployment process, and that development and production environments remain separate, with code promoted to production manually, ensuring AI agents cannot directly access production environments. 

Catalyst by Zoho is available for immediate use and offers a monthly free tier for developers to explore the platform, a pay-as-you-go pricing model, and a structured subscription option.