Cohere, a Canadian AI firm, has introduced North, a new AI agent platform designed to address critical data security concerns that have hindered the adoption of AI tools within large enterprises, highly regulated industries, and government agencies. The primary apprehension among organizations has been the potential for inadvertent data compromise or the use of their proprietary or customer data to train foundational models.
North’s core value proposition lies in its capability for private deployment, allowing enterprises and governments to maintain their and their customers’ data securely behind their own firewalls. Nick Frosst, co-founder of Cohere, emphasized this during a demonstration, stating, “LLMs are only as good as the data they have access to. 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.”
Unlike solutions relying on public enterprise cloud platforms such as Azure or AWS, Cohere asserts that North can be installed directly on an organization’s private infrastructure. This ensures that Cohere never accesses or interacts with customer data. North supports various deployment environments, including on-premise infrastructure, hybrid clouds, Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs), and air-gapped environments. Frosst further highlighted North’s efficiency, noting it was engineered to operate on as few as two GPUs, stating, “We can deploy literally on a GPU in a closet that they might have somewhere.”
To bolster its security claims, Cohere states that North incorporates several robust security protocols. These include granular access control, agent autonomy policies, continuous red-teaming, and third-party security tests. Furthermore, North is designed to comply with stringent international compliance standards, such as GDPR, SOC-2, and ISO 27001.
Cohere, which has raised a total of $970 million and was recently valued at $5.5 billion, has already initiated pilot programs for North with several prominent customers. These include RBC, Dell, LG, Ensemble Health Partners, and, as previously reported by TechCrunch, Palantir.
Functionally, North offers features common to many AI agent platforms, with its primary capabilities centered around chat and search. These features enable users to efficiently handle customer support inquiries, summarize meeting transcripts, generate marketing copy, and access information from both internal resources and the web. A key transparency feature highlighted by Frosst is that all responses generated by North include citations and “reasoning” chains of thought, empowering employees to audit and verify the output for accuracy and accountability.
The chat and search functionalities within North are powered by Cohere’s existing proprietary technologies: Command, its family of generative AI models, and Compass, its multimodal search tech stack. Frosst clarified that North utilizes a specialized variant of the Command model, specifically trained for enterprise reasoning. Beyond standard Q&A, North is designed for asset creation, capable of generating tables, documents, and slideshows, and performing market research. This latter capability is reinforced by Cohere’s acquisition of Ottogrid in May, a Vancouver-based platform specializing in automating high-level market research for enterprises.
Like other advanced AI agent platforms, North offers extensive integration capabilities with common workplace tools. It can connect seamlessly with applications such as Gmail, Slack, Salesforce, Outlook, and Linear. Additionally, North can integrate with any Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, allowing it to access industry-specific or in-house applications, further enhancing its utility within diverse enterprise environments. Frosst noted the progression in user interaction with the platform, observing, “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.”
