Toronto-based artificial intelligence company Cohere and Waterloo, Ont.-based OpenText Corp. have agreed to sell jointly developed “agentic AI” systems to governments and companies in regulated industries, the two companies announced Sept. 16 from Montreal.
The partnership combines Cohere’s North agentic AI orchestration platform and large language models with OpenText’s enterprise data and content management technology, integrating the two into OpenText’s existing Aviator AI agents. The companies said the joint offering will reach clients starting in early 2027, sold in part through OpenText’s existing reseller network.
“Data is not the supporting act, it is what gives agentic AI the context it needs to perform,” Ayman Antoun, OpenText’s chief executive officer, said in a statement announcing the deal.
Aidan Gomez, Cohere’s co-founder and chief executive officer, said enterprises and governments need AI systems that can work with sensitive data “while keeping them in control.”
OpenText, founded in Waterloo in 1991, says it serves more than 120,000 enterprise clients in 180 countries. Cohere, founded in Toronto in 2019, has raised roughly $1.6 billion US from investors to date, according to the companies, a figure that predates a separate funding round Cohere is reportedly negotiating that could value the company at up to $20 billion US, Bloomberg and the Globe and Mail have reported.
The companies announced the deal at ALL IN, Canada’s largest artificial intelligence conference, held in Montreal. Cohere vice-president of global partner ecosystem Michael McMillan told BetaKit the two companies share “the exact same customer profile target: highly regulated industries, government.”
The tie-up lands amid growing official caution about the technology it is built on. On April 30, 2026, the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security joined its counterparts in the United States, Britain, Australia and New Zealand, the so-called Five Eyes intelligence alliance, in issuing joint guidance on the “careful adoption” of agentic AI. The advisory warned that AI agents able to act autonomously across interconnected tools and data can expand an organization’s attack surface, and it recommended strict access controls, layered defences and mechanisms that keep humans able to intervene.
Cohere and OpenText say their offering addresses those concerns by letting clients run the technology on-premises or in private, public or sovereign clouds, rather than requiring data to leave a client’s own infrastructure, an option often required under government security rules and by regulators in sectors such as banking, insurance and health care.
The deal also points to a wider gap in enterprise AI adoption. According to figures cited by BetaKit, only a small fraction of roughly 700,000 published AI tools are capable of reliably completing real workplace tasks, as opposed to simpler functions like search and summarization, underscoring the market opening the two companies are chasing.
For Canadian businesses and public-sector buyers, the partnership adds a domestically headquartered option to a sovereign AI push Ottawa has made a stated policy priority, aiming to keep sensitive government and regulated-industry workloads on infrastructure and with vendors based in Canada rather than abroad.
