New open architecture connects AI agents, regulated workflows, and human-authenticated action to Kivo’s GxP-compliant platform.
PORTLAND, Ore. (May 20, 2026) – Kivo, the unified document and process management system for life sciences teams, today announced the launch of Headless GxPTM, a new agent-native architecture designed to help life sciences teams operationalize AI across Regulatory, Clinical, and Quality operations. Built on Kivo’s API-first platform, Headless GxP establishes Kivo as the system of record for AI in drug development – the permissioned data layer through which any AI tool, agent, or model can operate without compromising user authentication, audit trails, and electronic signatures.
Kivo believes the defensible core of life sciences software is shifting away from user interfaces and toward the data layer. As AI capabilities double roughly every six months and agentic ecosystems proliferate, organizations that lock their data inside closed, proprietary systems will fall behind. Those that build on an open, permissioned system will move with the market as it evolves.
“Most vendors in life sciences are building walls around your data in the name of security,” said Toban Zolman, CEO of Kivo. “but interoperability and compliance are not mutually exclusive. The future belongs to organizations that can orchestrate agents across heterogeneous systems while adhering to GxP.”
Kivo has the advantage of an open, API-based architecture that was designed to support the recent acceleration of agent frameworks and generative AI tooling. The company’s key-value enrichment and lossless migration tooling brings data in from legacy systems — metadata, audit trails, prior signatures— using validated processes. The result is a platform that can normalize data from many source systems while preserving the original context; context that can now by synthesized via Headless GxP.
AI-Enabled System of Record
Unlike closed AI implementations that limit agents to proprietary applications and workflows, Kivo Headless GxP is built on the principle that the security challenge in regulated AI is not keeping data away from tools — it is ensuring that when any tool touches regulated data, every interaction is authenticated, scoped to the right permissions, and permanently recorded.
As such, the first release of Kivo Headless GxP is intentionally read-only. Through a new MCP service layer, external AI systems can interrogate Kivo’s regulated content and workflow data. Structured action handoffs route proposed actions back into Kivo’s validated user interface for authenticated human review and execution. AI agents can analyze, cross-reference, summarize, and propose actions, but all compliance-meaningful actions remain tied to authenticated users, electronic signatures, and complete audit trails inside Kivo.
This approach reflects how regulated electronic records and signatures currently work: a specific human, acting under their own authenticated identity, taking a deliberate action the system permanently attributes to them. AI does the analysis. The human does the work. Kivo records both.
“‘Human in the loop’ means something specific at Kivo,” said Zolman. “It does not mean a person mindlessly approving what an agent decided. It means the agent makes the human faster, sharper, and able to reason across data that no individual could hold in their head — and then the human, equipped with that preparation, does the regulated work. The deeper the AI’s analysis, the more substantive the human’s action.”
Designed for the Next Era of Drug Development
As AI agents increasingly serve as the primary interface to regulated content, Kivo Headless GxP allows Kivo to act as the system of record and the system of coordination through which agents from any tool or platform operate.
Potential use cases span the full regulated development lifecycle, including:
- AI-assisted submission planning using historical correspondence, commitments, and prior submission data.
- Automated cross-referencing of CSR outputs against datasets, QC outputs, and tabular listings.
- Quality impact analysis across SOPs, work instructions, and related controlled documents.
“Some vendors are going to spend the next several years defending closed platforms,” said Zolman. “We would rather spend those years building doors.”
Learn more about Headless GxP by visiting www.headlessgxp.com, and register for the debut event on June 8th at 10am PT here: kivo.io/webinar/headless-launch.
About Kivo
Kivo is building the infrastructure for GxP compliance in the era of AI-powered drug development. Its unified cloud platform supports Regulatory, Clinical, and Quality operations — including RIM, eTMF, QMS, controlled document management, submission assembly, eCTD lifecycle management, inspection readiness, SOP management, and training management — within a single, audit-ready environment. With Part 11-compliant e-signatures, role-based permissions, continuous validation assurance, and a lossless data model that preserves context from legacy systems, Kivo gives life sciences teams the compliant foundation to reduce operational friction and accelerate time to market.
For more information, visit: https://kivo.io/.
