The Globe and Mail reports in its Tuesday edition that telecom giant BCE's Bell Canada and Canadian artificial-intelligence company Cohere have partnered to sell AI tools to governments and businesses. The Globe's Irene Galea and Joe Castaldo write that through the deal, Bell will sell access to Cohere's large language model software, North, to Bell enterprise and government customers, and host the technology on its data-centre infrastructure, providing Canadian companies with an alternative to American cloud computing giants such as Microsoft and Amazon Web Services. Bell will also use Cohere's AI technology internally across its employee base to improve productivity and efficiency. For Cohere, the deal with Bell represents another high-profile customer for North, which allows companies to build custom AI agents to help automate workflows. Royal Bank of Canada signed on in January. Perhaps more importantly, the deal could help Cohere win more domestic customers through Bell. Cohere's executives have previously said that Canadian companies have been slow to adopt AI. Cohere chief executive officer Aidan Gomez said Monday that, as of last year, more than 90 per cent of the company's revenue came from outside Canada.