Coherent moves Exiger trade compliance AI agents into Salesforce to screen customers before sales

Coherent Corporation has embedded Exiger's trade compliance AI agents in its Salesforce CRM so salespeople see a potential customer's denied-party status before a sale, Forbes reported. The photonics company reported first-quarter 2027 revenue up about 50% year over year.

How Coherent Put Screening Before The Sale

Coherent Corporation makes photonic lasers for cutting, sensing and measuring, and lasers that move information in communications and data centers. The company operates in more than 20 countries with over 30,000 employees and generated $5.8 billion in revenue last year.

Under the earlier process, Coherent could make a sale to a company on the banned entity list, manufacture the goods and have them on the warehouse dock before a customer screening showed the deal was not legally allowed. Rob Beard, Coherent's Chief Strategy, Legal and Global Affairs Officer, described the trade team's old methods: "When I got here, I learned I had people in the trade organization that were googling companies and looking at Street View" to identify which company they were really doing business with.

Coherent worked with its trade compliance partner Exiger to build AI agents that make trade data available to sales at the start of the process. "What we've been able to do is embed the knowledge that Exiger would provide our compliance team into our Salesforce tool," Beard said. "That prevents the sale from happening in the first place." Beard said building the new agents and embedding them in the CRM took only a couple of weeks, while the longer work was understanding where and how the agents would work. Coherent has not reduced its trade staff, which Beard said remains necessary because the company is growing so fast.

Coherent's AI Infrastructure Deals

According to akta.pro company records, Coherent joined the S&P 500 index in March 2026. The same records show Coherent entered 1.6T transceiver co-development partnerships with Broadcom for silicon photonics and with Marvell for its Ara 3nm optical DSP, both aimed at next-generation AI datacenter interconnects. Coherent also received a $2 billion equity investment from Nvidia alongside a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar purchase commitment to co-develop silicon photonics for AI factory scale.

Earlier Coherent Supply And Earnings News

On November 6, 2026, Guangzhi Technology's subsidiary Xianrui Technology signed a long-term supply letter of intent with Coherent to provide 6-inch indium phosphide substrates to Coherent's Swiss and Swedish facilities from 2027 to 2029, with an expected transaction value of no less than US$601 million, Moomoo reported. Coherent's Q1 2027 earnings call was live on November 4, 2026, with executives discussing financial results and answering analyst questions, according to TradingView. In August 2026, Simply Wall St reported that Coherent posted record revenue and margin expansion driven by AI data center optical connectivity demand, prompting plans for increased capital spending and capacity growth.

Exiger's Air Force Contract

On November 4, 2026, Exiger was awarded a $12 million contract to support the U.S. Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center's ICBM Systems Directorate with supply chain illumination and defense industrial base analysis, PR Newswire reported.