Saab and Cohere sign an MOU to apply advanced AI to GlobalEye and secure aerospace workflows

Overview

Cohere used X on March 24, 2026 to publicize a March 23 Saab press release announcing a memorandum of understanding on advanced AI collaboration. The agreement centers on Saab's GlobalEye airborne early warning and control platform and is tied directly to the Canadian GlobalEye opportunity, while also covering current and future international operators.

This is not a finished product announcement. Saab describes the deal as a framework for pilot work and joint exploration, but the target areas are concrete enough to matter: data-driven mission support, maintenance tools, and information processing that can run on premises inside secure aerospace environments.

What Saab and Cohere are proposing

According to Saab, the partnership is meant to combine aerospace systems expertise with Cohere's enterprise AI stack. The company says the collaboration will examine on-premises integrations for complex secure environments, which is an important detail for defense and civil-security programs that cannot rely on public-cloud-only deployments. Saab also says the work is intended to strengthen its global product offering, not just one domestic bid.

Cohere co-founder Ivan Zhang said the companies want AI that scales with trust, reliability, and real-world impact in operational settings. The stated goal is to help teams process complex data faster, raise operational tempo, surface important signals more clearly, and support critical decision making. That language suggests the initial focus is less on general chat interfaces and more on workflow-specific systems where model outputs must fit existing command, maintenance, and sensor pipelines.

Why it matters

The announcement is notable because it places enterprise AI directly inside a defense and aerospace context where data sovereignty, deployment control, and certification constraints are central. Cohere has increasingly emphasized security-first enterprise deployments, and Saab's release explicitly calls out on-premises integration as part of the collaboration. If the pilot projects progress, the partnership could become a reference case for how foundation-model vendors adapt their software to high-assurance industrial environments rather than generic SaaS workflows.

Primary source: Saab press release.