One of Canada’s largest software services firms is partnering with Canada’s AI champion to help enterprises bring AI agents into their businesses.
The news: Toronto-based Cohere is working with Waterloo-based software giant OpenText to make an agentic AI solution available early next year for OpenText’s roughly 120,000 enterprise clients. Cohere’s agentic AI platform North and its models will connect to OpenText’s data and context layer.
From the source: “We have the exact same customer profile target [as OpenText]: highly regulated industries, government,” Michael McMillan, Cohere’s vice-president of the global partner ecosystem, said on stage at ALL IN on Wednesday. “What’s been difficult to date is they have massive amounts of data [and] we have great agents and reasoning tools. How do you build that together?”
The context: The companies are hopeful that this joint offering will help these large enterprise clients use AI in more sophisticated ways; for instance, using several agents together to automate complex tasks. Lots of companies are adopting AI across their business stack, but many are just using it for basic tasks like searching and summarizing. A Cohere research report found that among nearly 700,000 published AI tools across public directories, only 2.6 percent of them carry out an “occupational task,” instead of just providing information.
Final thought: While AI agents can have helpful business use cases, they are also seen as a riskier deployment of AI, particularly when dealing with sensitive data—a concern that has only grown with the high-profile OpenAI hack of AI company Hugging Face. The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security released a report last week urging “careful adoption” of the tech to protect against fraud and agents going rogue. McMillan affirmed on stage that Cohere’s partnership with OpenText aims to ensure agents are only granted access to the right data.
Feature image courtesy ALL IN. Photo by Melanie Olmstead Photographe.