1 No-Brainer Dividend Stock to Buy Now and Hold Forever

What if one of the smartest “forever” dividend stocks on the TSX was actually, a tech stock? That’s the opportunity with OpenText (TSX:OTEX) today. On the surface, it looks like an older Canadian tech name that missed the flashy consumer-app wave. Under the hood, it’s quietly becoming a pure data-and-artificial intelligence (AI) powerhouse that already touches huge parts of your daily life. And it is paying you a growing dividend to come along for the ride.

The shift

OpenText’s pitch is simple. It helps the world’s biggest organizations manage and actually use their data. Think everything from utility companies trying to prevent wildfires, to hospitals getting new drugs through approval. The company already works with tens of thousands of customers in more than 180 countries, including the vast majority of the world’s largest enterprises. Its software hums away in the background, keeping documents, payments, workflows, and now AI agents running securely and on time.

That “under the hood” role is exactly why the new AI story matters. At OpenText World 2025 in Nashville, management rolled out the OpenText AI Data Platform and a suite of “Aviator” enterprise AI agents. These tools sit on top of a company’s private data and automate real work in a secure, governed way. Instead of just offering generic AI chat, OpenText stock is building a platform where customers can deploy armies of task-specific agents that know their documents, systems, and rules.

Numbers don’t lie

This shows up in the numbers. In its latest quarter, Q1 fiscal 2026, OpenText posted revenue of about US$1.3 billion, up 1.5% year over year, with cloud revenue growing a faster 6% and now clocking 19 straight quarters of organic cloud growth. Recurring revenue is more than US$1.1 billion and makes up over 80% of the total. For a supposedly “old” tech name, that’s a very modern cash-machine profile.

Then there’s the dividend. On the TSX, OpenText stock’s yield sits around 3.2% at writing. That doesn’t sound thrilling until you realize this is a software company with a history of increasing its dividend over the last decade. Plus, OTEX has a payout ratio at just 55%! In other words, there’s plenty of room to keep paying and keep growing that payout while still investing in AI, cloud, and acquisitions.

Looking ahead

What really jumps out is how tangible the use cases have become. A utility using OpenText stock to monitor transformers and trigger an automated field response before a wildfire starts. A health-care group using its platform as the backbone of the controlled document process needed for FDA submissions. A big bank’s B2B platform making sure gig-economy workers actually get their money on time. These aren’t fun demos, but mission-critical workflows. Failure means power outages, delayed drugs, or missed paycheques. That kind of embedded importance is exactly what long-term investors should want.

Strategically, CPO and CTO Savinay Berry stated the company is divesting non-core on-premise assets like eDOCS, while talking openly about “shrink to grow.” Instead, it’s concentrating on businesses tied directly to information management for AI. At the same time, it’s using its own products internally to cut costs and streamline a previously messy stack of tools – a move that is expected to save well over a billion dollars over the coming decade and improve the products for customers.

Bottom line

For Canadian investors who want a tech name they can actually hold for income and growth over decades, OpenText stock checks a lot of boxes. It powers real-world systems you can point to, it’s leaning hard into AI from a position of strength, and it quietly rewards patient shareholders with a growing dividend. In fact, here’s what $7,000 could bring in at writing.

That’s exactly the kind of “boring” no-brainer you want doing the heavy lifting in a long-term portfolio.