Cohere Launches North: A Secure AI Agent Platform for Enterprise Data Protection

Cohere's new AI agent platform, North, promises to keep enterprise data secure | TechCrunch

AI agent tools promise to siphon out some of the drudgery from daily workflows, but most organizations are hesitant to adopt them yet, harboring a pressing concern: data security. Large enterprises with trade secrets, companies in highly regulated industries, and government agencies have thought more than twice about bringing in AI tools out of concern that their -- or worse, their customers' -- data could inadvertently be compromised, or used to train foundation models. Canadian AI firm Cohere is taking aim at alleviating those concerns with its new AI agent platform dubbed North, which promises to enable private deployment so that enterprises and governments can keep their and customers' data safe behind their own firewalls. "LLMs are only as good as the data they have access to," Nick Frosst, co-founder and CEO of Cohere, said during a demo of North. "If we want LLMs to be as useful as possible, they have to access that useful data, and that means they need to be deployed in [the customer's] environment." Instead of using enterprise cloud platforms like Azure or AWS, Cohere says it can install North on an organization's private infrastructure so that it never sees or interacts with a customer's data. North can run on an organization's on-premise infrastructure, hybrid clouds, VPCs, or air-gapped environments, Frosst said. "We can deploy literally on a GPU in a closet that they might have somewhere," he explained, adding that North was designed to run on as few as two GPUs. Cohere claims North also includes security protocols like granular access control, agent autonomy policies, continuous red-teaming, and third-party security tests. And, it meets international compliance standards like GDPR, SOC-2, and ISO 27001. Cohere, which has so far raised $970 million, most recently at a $5.5 billion valuation, said it has already piloted North with some customers such as RBC, Dell, LG, Ensemble Health Partners, and, as TechCrunch reported last year, Palantir. North mirrors many AI agent platforms right out of the box. Its chief features are chat and search, which let users get answers to customer support inquiries; summarize meeting transcripts, write marketing copy, and access information from both internal resources and the web. Frosst added that all responses include citations and "reasoning" chains of thought so employees can audit and verify the output. The chat and search functions are powered by existing Cohere technology, like Command (its family of generative AI models), and Compass (its multimodal search tech stack). Frosst said North is powered by a variant of its Command model that is trained for enterprise reasoning. "It goes beyond just Q&A and gets into doing work for you. So, [North] has a bunch of asset creation. It can make tables, it can make documents, it can make slideshows. It can do a bunch of market research," Frosst said. It's worth noting that in May, Cohere acquired Ottogrid, a Vancouver-based platform that develops enterprise tools for automating high-level market research. Like other AI agent platforms, North can connect to existing workplace tools like Gmail, Slack, Salesforce, Outlook and Linear, and integrate with any Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers to access industry-specific or in-house applications. "As you build confidence by chatting to the model, there's like a smooth transition that happens between using this as an augmentation to using it as an automation," Frosst said.

Cohere launches its North AI productivity platform into general availability - SiliconANGLE

Cohere launches its North AI productivity platform into general availability Artificial intelligence startup Cohere Inc. today made its North productivity platform generally available. The launch comes about seven months after the offering debuted in early access. Since then, Cohere has built up an initial installed base that includes Dell Technologies Inc., the Royal Bank of Canada and other large enterprises. North provides a chatbot interface that workers can use to ask questions about their organization's records. The software is capable of retrieving data from documents, cloud applications and other sources. North can find a file even if a user doesn't specify its name, but only provides a general description of details such as what information it contains. The platform's second core focus is automating content creation. Workers can have North generate financial data visualizations, competitor research reports and other assets. The platform displays a step-by-step overview of how it generates each asset. For example, North might show the SQL query it created to retrieve the data that went into an AI-generated budget proposal. According to Cohere, companies can also use the platform to automate repetitive business tasks. A sales team, for example, could configure North to sync new deal details to a customer relationship management system. Cohere says that the platform uses collections of AI agents to automate multistep business chores. North connects to popular cloud applications using a set of prepackaged integrations. If needed, companies can also link the platform to their custom software via MCP. Originally developed by Anthropic PBC, MCP is a networking protocol that allows agents to take actions in external systems. Under the hood, North is reportedly powered by a "variant" of Cohere's flagship Command large language model series. The newest addition to the LLM series, Command A, requires as few as two graphics cards to run. Cohere stated today that on-premises deployments of North can likewise make do with as few as two graphics cards. Cohere says that Command A can generate prompt responses 75% faster than OpenAI's GPT-4o model. Furthermore, it mostly outperformed GPT-4o in an internal output quality evaluation. Cohere compared the two models using a set of benchmarks that measure LLMs' ability to follow instructions, use tools, generate SQL code and power AI agents. Companies can add guardrails to the AI agents that North uses to automate manual work. Administrators may block agents from performing certain tasks, as well as require them to seek human oversight when carrying out an important activity. In the background, a logging tool tracks service performance and changes to key settings. The launch of North comes amid reports that Cohere is seeking to raise $500 million in new funding. The investment could reportedly value the company between $5.5 billion and $6.5 billion. Cohere's annualized annual revenue is expected to top $200 million by year's end, up from $100 million in May.

Cohere launches North for secure AI agent deployment

Canadian AI company Cohere has launched North, a new AI agent platform designed for private deployment to address enterprise and government data security concerns. The platform allows organizations to use its AI tools while keeping their data behind their own firewalls. North can be installed on an organization's on-premise infrastructure, hybrid clouds, Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs), or in air-gapped environments, and is designed to run on as few as two GPUs. Cohere states the platform includes security features such as granular access control and agent autonomy policies, and that it meets compliance standards including GDPR, SOC-2, and ISO 27001. The platform's core features are chat and search, which allow users to get answers to inquiries, summarize documents, and write marketing copy. It can also create assets like tables, documents, and slideshows. All responses include citations and reasoning chains for verification. The system is powered by a variant of Cohere's Command family of generative AI models and its Compass search technology. North can connect to existing workplace tools like Gmail, Slack, and Salesforce, and integrate with industry-specific applications. Cohere, which has raised $970 million at a recent valuation of $5.5 billion, has already piloted North with customers including RBC, Dell, LG, Ensemble Health Partners, and Palantir.

Cohere's agentic AI platform North gets wide release, aims to handle 'boring' work

Cohere is making its agentic artificial intelligence platform more widely available. The Toronto-based tech firm announced Wednesday that its North platform, which was launched in a limited fashion in January, is getting a broader release. The platform is already in use at Bell, Royal Bank of Canada and Dell. North can help companies summarize meetings, punch up marketing copy, answer customer support inquiries, draft financial reports and more. "It is a tool for augmenting and automating all of the work you do behind a computer that you would rather not do," said Cohere co-founder Nick Frosst. Agentic AI systems like North have been heralded as the next frontier for AI innovation and positioned as a booster of workplace productivity because they're essentially advanced software programs designed to independently reason, access information from various sources and execute intricate tasks. Frosst uses North on a daily basis for "the boring work, the monotonous work, the bureaucratic work." With North doing those tasks, Frosst said anything "distinctly human" is left for him. North came in handy recently when he was at an esports tournament and learned he was about to meet the CEO of a company Cohere had worked with four years ago. Usually, he'd have time to research the relationship between the businesses or ask staff to compile some notes, but with only a few minutes notice, he said he turned to North to put together a list of bullet points summarizing the companies' history. Frosst said it can just as easily be used to complete tasks such as crafting descriptions for job postings. North is able to do these tasks because users give the large language models (LLMs), which underpin the platform, access to their existing data and workspaces including Gmail, Slack, Salesforce and Outlook. "LLMs are only as good as the data they have access to," Frosst explained. While companies often eschew AI systems because they need to limit who can access proprietary data, Frosst said North is different. "We can pull from wherever your data is but keep it in your environment so that we do not see it and that's pretty differentiated," he said. The system can be set up within a company's environment and lets firms granularly dictate access, so users can be selective about what platforms North can reach and Cohere can ensure other users can't get ahold of someone's data once it's being used by North. The tool is also designed so it will only take actions that are authorized and will always seek human oversight for critical decisions or actions. While people may worry agentic AI systems will render a lot of jobs or tasks unnecessary, Frosst stresses North is designed to take the sting out of laborious tasks and give humans more time for creative, interesting work. For the vast majority of users, he said North can only augment and automate "a relatively small percentage" of the work done behind a computer. "There are not many jobs that this automates entirely," he said. --- CTV News and BNN Bloomberg are owned by Bell Media, which is a division of BCE.