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Two Canadian technology companies, OpenText (OTEX-T) and Cohere, are teaming up on a new effort aimed at helping governments and other highly regulated organizations adopt artificial intelligence (AI) across their operations.
“The partnership is really designed to help governments and regulated industries move agentic AI from pilot to production,” Shannon Bell, executive vice-president, chief digital officer and chief information officer at Waterloo, Ont.’s OpenText said to TechNX in an interview.
“We’re combining OpenText trusted data and context capabilities with Cohere’s North orchestration platform and their enterprise AI models, and this enables us to deliver a more complete enterprise-ready agentic AI stack.”
The two companies are aiming to offer AI tools that will bring together disparate systems inside complex organizational environments.
‘Natural partnership’ to offer 'trusted' AI agents
OpenText will provide the data and context layer, and Cohere will bring the application and orchestration layer, according to OpenText. It is expected to be offered to clients in 2027.
“What we’ve learned through our 120,000 enterprise clients globally is that they need agents that can reason over trusted information; that can take action across different systems and workflows, and so on, and really can do so without sacrificing control over data, location security, or deployment,” Bell said.
This “very natural partnership” should allow organizations to deploy agents in many areas.
“We’re really bringing that governed data and context, and the controls that allow us to make AI trustworthy, and then Cohere is delivering the models and the agentic orchestration capability,” she said.
In its most recent financial filing, OpenText saw revenue of $1.3 billion and net income of $168 million during the second fiscal quarter of 2026.
More to come for both firms
The partnership will involve two related aspects, according to Bell. “One is a go-to-market relationship where we’re bringing Cohere to the market. Certainly we see a lot of demand across our enterprise clients and across government and regulated industries to have that capability.”
But it goes even further, she said. “We actually have our engineering teams working together. Base integration of our platforms is done through standard interfaces and protocols, but the teams have been really working together to think through how to enable the agentic enterprise.”
So what did OpenText see in Cohere?
The company is “focused on government and regulated industries, which fits very well with some of our client base,” Bell said. With OpenText seeing client choice as a “foundational principle,” Cohere’s multi-phased offering (cloud-based or private on-site) fits in nicely.
“Cohere provides the flexibility to deploy their technology, their models in those deployment models. So the fact that they’re offering that level of choice for those types of clients, it resonated with the strategy and certainly what many of our clients are asking for,” Bell said.
That choice is important for a lot of firms, according to Deloitte Canada, which recently launched a new practice that will allow firms to deploy AI in a number of different ways.
By partnering, both OpenText and Cohere must strongly focus on governance and trust in order to secure sometimes crucial, private data, according to Bell, and this effort looks to work well within government and regulatory organizations.
“When you look at one of the challenges to deploying agentic AI, many organizations struggle with data as the foundation. For regulated industries, they’ve had governance around their data for quite some time, and so that actually gives them an advantage in that many times their data is well organized and governed, and can be served up into agentic AI to drive the outcomes.”
About OpenText, Cohere
OpenText began in 1991, originally to put the Oxford English Dictionary online as a partnership between University of Waterloo and Oxford University. Today, it has more than 20,000 employees and operates in 180 countries.
Cohere is headquartered in Toronto and San Francisco, and recently merged with Germany’s Aleph Alpha. It was started in 2019.
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