OpenText and Cohere have announced a strategic partnership designed to deliver secure agentic artificial intelligence to governments and highly regulated industries. The collaboration will combine OpenText's enterprise data and context layer with North, Cohere's agentic AI platform and its large language models. The integrated solution is expected to reach clients in early 2027.
Complementary AI Capabilities
The partnership addresses complementary layers of the AI stack for the agentic enterprise. OpenText acts as the data and context layer, unlocking unstructured, operational and transactional data to give agentic AI necessary context. Cohere contributes the application and orchestration layer through North and its enterprise models for complex automations at scale.
Deployment Choice and Security
Clients will be able to choose where the combined AI runs, including on-premises, private, public or sovereign cloud environments. This flexibility is intended to meet strict security, data and deployment requirements common in regulated sectors. OpenText's data and context layer already operates inside leading federal governments, healthcare systems, financial institutions, insurers and global supply chains.
Executive Perspectives
OpenText CEO Ayman Antoun said data is not the supporting act but the element that gives agentic AI context to perform. Cohere co-founder and CEO Aidan Gomez added that enterprises and governments need AI that can work with important data while maintaining control over where data lives and how it is used. Together, the leaders emphasized that the collaboration provides a secure path from pilot to production.
Integration and Market Strategy
The partnership includes product development, integration of Cohere's agentic platform and models into OpenText Aviator AI agents, coordinated go-to-market execution and a strategic reseller relationship through SOLEX. This arrangement enables OpenText to offer Cohere-supported solutions both on-premises and through OpenText Cloud. The companies are aligning their product roadmaps to give enterprise and public sector clients a unified path to agentic AI.
Canadian AI Leadership
OpenText was founded in Canada in 1991 and now serves more than 120,000 enterprise clients across 180 countries. Cohere was founded in Toronto in 2019 and has become a leading sovereign AI company serving enterprise and public sector organizations. Together, the two Canadian AI leaders extend a common foundation in trust and security to regulated markets worldwide.
From Pilots to Production
Many large organizations have adopted AI for basic tasks such as searching and summarizing, but a Cohere research report found that only 2.6 percent of nearly 700,000 published AI tools perform an occupational task. The partnership is designed to help clients use several agents together to automate complex processes while preserving oversight and accountability. It targets a gap that has previously limited agentic AI adoption by connecting trusted data, context, orchestration and large language models.
Security and Governance Focus
Concerns around AI agents and sensitive data have grown, prompting the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security to urge careful adoption of the technology. Cohere's vice-president of global partner ecosystem, Michael McMillan, affirmed that the partnership aims to ensure agents are only granted access to the right data. This approach is intended to reduce risks related to fraud and unauthorized agent actions.
This partnership signals a meaningful step toward production-ready agentic AI in environments where trust and control are essential. By uniting OpenText's data foundation with Cohere's orchestration and models, the companies are offering a path for regulated organizations to move beyond pilot projects. The combined offering is expected to help clients automate complex workflows while preserving security, deployment choice, and human oversight.