LIVE FROM MWC25 LAS VEGAS: Bell Canada plans to double revenue from selling AI services and tools to businesses to CAD1.5 billion ($1.1 billion) by 2028, largely enabled by a partnership with start-up Cohere.

Group president of business markets for Bell John Watson (pictured, centre) said the partnership is a key reason for its revenue projection.

The deal combines Cohere’s advanced large language models (LLMs) and agentic AI platform with Bell’s sovereign infrastructure to offer tailored services to Canadian government and enterprise customers.

“It’s the perfect time to meld those two together,” Watson said.

“And what folks should realise is whatever we do internally with a wall-to-wall Cohere landscape, we then build the intellectual property, the capabilities and then take that to go to market.”

“AI and enterprise are hard,” he said. “We don’t make it easy. We make it easier.”

In May, the operator announced plans for six data centres in British Columbia which will use 500 megawatts of clean power. Watson said the first site is up and the second is scheduled to go live by the end of the year.

Watson noted using a full AI stack from Cohere in combination with its AI fabric launched in May will enable Bell to be a champion for Canadian companies by supporting their sovereign needs.  

“It’s sovereignty without solitude.”

“It is the necessity of figuring out how you manage that [Software-as-a-Service] SaaS layer so you can fully operationalise and manage that LLM that’s still being connected but meeting the sovereign requirements.”

Pitch
Cohere COO and president Martin Kon (pictured, right) said the Canadian company has global ambitions, as borne out by work with Fujitsu in Japan and LG Electronics in South Korea.

Unlike its six AI competitors, Kon said Cohere is the only one not controlled by big US tech entities.

“We’re fully independent, which means we do whatever’s right for our customers, partners and investors.”

“It also means that we’re completely platform agnostic, even hardware agnostic. We’re not tied to any one hyperscaler. In fact, we deploy on all of them.”

While sovereignty is top of mind for some companies and countries Kon used an analogy to explain Cohere’s position.

“I’m not going to buy Canadian chocolate just because it’s Canadian.”

“You can’t compromise on quality and on technical leadership just because it’s sovereign.”

To that end, Cohere and Bell Canada have partnerships in place with companies including Nvidia, AMD, Dell and Oracle to bring the best capabilities together.

“Our partners will have capabilities that are better even than our own standard capabilities that are unique and specific for the needs of their customers and their partners,” Kon said.

For banking, insurance, oil and gas, energy utilities, transportation, supply chain and healthcare verticals, the partnership protects dedicated clusters and provides dedicated capacity within Bell’s data centre environments.

Kon explained while Cohere will never have a pro-consumer chatbot like its peers, Bell has thousands of SMB partnerships he said would benefit from the operator deploying North.