Cohere Launches 'North': A Secure AI Workspace for Enterprise Productivity

Cohere Launches its AI Workspace 'North'

"Companies looking for an AI solution have never asked us about AGI or ASI....but about data security and privacy," said Cohere AI's Josh Gartner. Cohere, a Canada-based AI startup, has launched North, a secure platform designed to help businesses manage workflows. With tools powered by large language models (LLMs), advanced search capabilities, and automation features, North simplifies data management and routine operations for organisations across sectors. A key feature of the platform is its Compass search system, which can retrieve information from various sources, including documents, spreadsheets, and images. By addressing the inefficiencies caused by fragmented data systems, Compass seeks to enable teams to make faster, better-informed decisions. "North gets rid of the pain that enterprises experience during the AI adoption process, providing near-immediate productivity benefits while being privately deployable," said Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez in a statement. The platform integrates with existing workflows, allowing employees to create custom AI tools for tasks in HR, finance, IT, and customer support. By automating repetitive processes, North frees employees to focus on higher-priority work. Last month, the company launched Command R7B, the smallest model in its R series of LLMs. These target businesses that prioritise speed, cost efficiency, and flexibility. In addition to its productivity tools, North prioritises security. The platform operates in private or air-gapped environments, making it suitable for industries with strict regulatory requirements, such as finance, healthcare, and manufacturing. Organisations can customise the system to match their specific terminology and internal processes. "Companies looking for an AI solution never ask us about AGI or ASI. But every company asks about data security and privacy," said Josh Gartner, head of communications at Cohere AI. Early trials of North include a collaboration with the Royal Bank of Canada, which helped tailor the platform for secure banking applications. This partnership reflects North's potential to meet the unique demands of regulated industries. Available through an early access programme, North integrates AI into existing workflows without requiring costly bespoke systems. With its emphasis on security and flexibility, Cohere positions North as a tool to support businesses in improving productivity and operational efficiency while navigating the challenges of AI adoption.

Canada-based startup Cohere Launches North, its AI Workspace

"Companies looking for an AI solution have never asked us about AGI or ASI....but about data security and privacy," said Cohere AI's Josh Gartner. Cohere, a Canada-based AI startup, has launched North, a secure platform designed to help businesses manage workflows. With tools powered by large language models (LLMs), advanced search capabilities, and automation features, North simplifies data management and routine operations for organisations across sectors. A key feature of the platform is its Compass search system, which can retrieve information from various sources, including documents, spreadsheets, and images. By addressing the inefficiencies caused by fragmented data systems, Compass seeks to enable teams to make faster, better-informed decisions. "North gets rid of the pain that enterprises experience during the AI adoption process, providing near-immediate productivity benefits while being privately deployable," said Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez in a statement. The platform integrates with existing workflows, allowing employees to create custom AI tools for tasks in HR, finance, IT, and customer support. By automating repetitive processes, North frees employees to focus on higher-priority work. Last month, the company launched Command R7B, the smallest model in its R series of LLMs. These target businesses that prioritise speed, cost efficiency, and flexibility. In addition to its productivity tools, North prioritises security. The platform operates in private or air-gapped environments, making it suitable for industries with strict regulatory requirements, such as finance, healthcare, and manufacturing. Organisations can customise the system to match their specific terminology and internal processes. "Companies looking for an AI solution never ask us about AGI or ASI. But every company asks about data security and privacy," said Josh Gartner, head of communications at Cohere AI. Early trials of North include a collaboration with the Royal Bank of Canada, which helped tailor the platform for secure banking applications. This partnership reflects North's potential to meet the unique demands of regulated industries. Available through an early access programme, North integrates AI into existing workflows without requiring costly bespoke systems. With its emphasis on security and flexibility, Cohere positions North as a tool to support businesses in improving productivity and operational efficiency while navigating the challenges of AI adoption.

Cohere just launched 'North', its biggest AI bet yet for privacy-focused enterprises

North combines large language models, search capabilities, and automation tools in a secure package that lets companies deploy AI while maintaining control over sensitive data. The platform operates in private cloud environments or on-premises installations, targeting regulated industries like finance and healthcare. "The market for artificial intelligence is maturing, and enterprises have begun to understand the opportunity," Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez said in an internal company letter shared on LinkedIn last month. "While consumers have fallen in love with the technology and use it as part of their daily lives, enterprises are struggling to keep up." Royal Bank of Canada has already partnered with Cohere to develop North for Banking, a specialized version designed for financial institutions. This marks one of the first major enterprise deployments of the platform. North's built-in search system, Compass, processes multiple data types including images, presentations, spreadsheets, and documents across languages. Internal testing shows the system reduces task completion times by more than 80% compared to manual searches. "It's becoming clear that for enterprises, it is not sufficient to simply prompt or finetune an off-the-shelf consumer AI chatbot for a work environment," Gomez said. "They want something customized for their needs. They want a true partner to help achieve their goals." Gomez challenged the industry's focus on computational scale, noting that "data quality and novel methods like synthetic data have driven far more of the progress these past 18 months than scale." He claimed this approach has made Cohere "an order of magnitude more capital efficient than our competition." The platform lets employees build and customize AI tools for their specific needs without requiring technical expertise. Early testers include companies in finance, healthcare, manufacturing, and infrastructure -- sectors where data security has traditionally limited AI adoption. North is currently available through an early access program, targeting finance, healthcare, manufacturing, and critical infrastructure sectors. The launch could reshape how businesses implement AI technologies, as companies increasingly prioritize security and customization over raw computational power. "Going forward, every company will be an AI company," Gomez said, emphasizing the need for secure, rapidly deployable solutions.

Cohere introduces LLM-powered North productivity platform - SiliconANGLE

Cohere introduces LLM-powered North productivity platform Cohere Inc. today introduced North, a new product designed to make it easier for business workers to use its artificial intelligence models. The company describes the offering as a "secure AI workplace platform." It's available through an early access program. Toronto-based Cohere develops a series of large language models called Command. Unlike OpenAI, the company doesn't offer a consumer chatbot service but rather focuses solely on the enterprise market. Cohere received a $5.5 billion valuation last July following a $500 million funding round. North, the company's new product, provides a chatbot interface that allows customers to interact with its Command LLM series. Workers can use the tool to analyze earnings reports, find documents and perform other business tasks. North can include not only text in its prompt responses but also other data such as graphs. Users can customize North by creating AI agents, AI programs optimized for a narrow set of tasks. A human resources professional, for example, could build an agent that automates some of the work involved in onboarding new hires. Cohere says that creating an AI agent takes a few clicks and doesn't require programming expertise. In an internal evaluation, the company compared North with Microsoft Copilot and Google Vertex AI Agent Builder across a set of finance, HR, customer support and IT tasks. Cohere says that its product outperformed the competition across all four categories. The test used a benchmark called Llama Index that accepts an AI-generated answer if it's "at least relevant and correct." Under the hood, North is powered by not only Command but also Cohere's Compass product. The latter offering is an AI-powered search tool that can find specific data snippets in a company's systems and make them available to AI models. It extracts data from not only documents but also multimodal files such as slides, images and spreadsheets. Compass is based on two AI models. The first, Embed, turns data into embeddings, mathematical representations that AI models can process more easily than raw business documents. The other model, Rerank, analyzes the information that is retrieved in response to a user query and prioritizes the most relevant items. According to Cohere, North can be deployed both in the cloud and on-premises. It's capable of running in air-gapped environments, environments that are isolated from the rest of a company's network and the web for cybersecurity reasons. That could make it easier for organizations in highly regulated industries to adopt North. "The current build-it-yourself approach to AI deployment places a huge burden on organizations to invest the time, expertise, and resources into developing bespoke solutions and then maintaining them," Cohere founder and Chief Executive Officer Aidan Gomez wrote in a blog post. "North helps avoid these pain points and reduces the time to value for customers." Cohere says that the Royal Bank of Canada is one of the early customers using North. According to the LLM provider, it will work with the bank to develop a version of the software optimized for the financial sector. That raises the possibility Cohere could potentially launch additional industry -specific versions down the road.