Cohere Introduces North, a Secure AI Workspace

Jan. 10, 2025 — Cohere has launched the early access program for North, the company’s all-in-one secure AI workspace platform that empowers employees to significantly improve the quality and speed of their work. North helps employees across teams and industries offload routine tasks and focus their time on where they can add the most value to their company. North moves beyond isolated foundation models – combining LLMs, search, and agents into an intuitive platform that effortlessly integrates AI into your daily work.

North is designed to meet the strictest security and privacy standards because we understand that this is mission-critical to companies. The platform is optimized to run in private–including air-gapped–environments so that organizations can safely integrate all their sensitive data in one place. This ensures enterprises can unlock the productivity and efficiency benefits of AI without having to build the technology themselves or risk your data in a complex web of third party service providers.

Cohere has designed North to put the user in control, stay out of the way, and enable employees to do their best work. By developing a vertically integrated technology stack that includes both the foundation models and a user-friendly platform, Cohere can create an unrivaled product experience that reduces the barriers to adoption. Ultimately, North is a partner to get more done.

Credit: Cohere

How North Guides Workforce Toward Peak Productivity

North equips organizations with the tools to realize the full potential of their data and their people. The platform enables users to instantly customize and deploy AI agents that can help them find relevant information across global organizations in multiple languages, conduct research & analysis, and perform complex tasks spanning various lines of business and previously disconnected tools.

Any employee, regardless of their technical background, can effortlessly create, customize, and share an AI agent with just a few clicks. This includes agents for core business functions like HR, finance, customer support, and IT that allow teams to execute faster and achieve more.

Accuracy across Finance, HR, Customer Support and IT benchmarks comparing Microsoft Copilot, Google Vertex AI Agent Builder, and Cohere North. Cohere measures the percentage of completions from each model that received a Llama Index (LI) score of at least ‘relevant and correct.’ LI is a common industry metric that assigns a score to a completion based on its comparison with a ground truth answer. This graph shows the LI performance of competitors relative to North, indicating North outperforms competitors on all benchmarks. Credit: Cohere.

Seamless Integration

North provides a trusted platform that seamlessly integrates into existing workflows right out-of-the-box. AI agents created with North can quickly and easily connect to the workplace tools and applications that employees regularly use. This ability to integrate with any tool a business cares about (including in-house applications) enables North to automate large swaths of tedious work leveraging internal data behind your secured firewalls.

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. North helps avoid these pain points and reduces the time to value for customers. This means faster workforce adoption, allowing your teams to experience the productivity benefits of AI sooner.

Accuracy of Microsoft Copilot, Google Vertex AI Agent Builder and Cohere North on a proprietary evaluation benchmark based on Cohere internal documents and real life employee prompts. Left: Percentage of completions from each model that received a Llama Index score of at least ‘relevant and correct’. Right: Percentage of completions from each model that received a Human Evaluation score of ‘Perfect’. Auto evals may over-estimate competitor performance compared to blind human user evals. Credit: Cohere.

Cutting-Edge Search System

Among its capabilities, North leverages our most advanced multimodal AI search and discovery system, Compass. This system addresses a core challenge with today’s business data being scattered across various applications and teams as well as data that exists in different modalities, formats, and languages. Fragmented data can hinder the ability of organizations to make informed decisions and stay competitive.

Seamlessly built into the backbone of North, Compass accurately indexes, stores, and enables quickly searching complex enterprise data. This includes extracting information from multimodal data sources like images, slides, spreadsheets, and documents, enabling employees to quickly surface actionable insights from across their business.

A fine-grained security system ensures the right access controls, enabling employees to use AI on their internal data, while ensuring that no sensitive data is leaked.

Two graphs showing how Cohere North reduces the average time it takes to complete a task requiring company knowledge by 5.45x while maintaining the same level of response quality. North response time was measured by having human annotators complete tasks using the North interface connected to a Google Drive, and Manual Search was measured by having human annotators complete their tasks using a search bar, cmd F and advanced search over documents in a Google Drive. Response quality was measured by the percentage of annotator-written answers that received a LI score of at least ‘relevant and correct.’ Credit: Cohere.

Industry-Specific Customization

Since Cohere developed each part of the technology stack underpinning North, the platform can be tailored to suit the unique needs of any business. This granular level of control is essential for customizing AI solutions to match each organization’s needs such as industry-specific terminology and internal knowledge. Additionally, with Cohere’s industry-leading focus on privacy and security, North is well suited for regulated industries where companies simply cannot risk their proprietary data.

Cohere has already started engaging with a limited number of businesses across sectors like finance, healthcare, manufacturing, and critical infrastructure to deploy North on an early access basis. The company is excited to be partnering with Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), a leading global financial institution to explore the transformative potential of AI in banking. Cohere and RBC are co-developing North for Banking, a tailored AI solution designed to enhance workforce productivity while meeting the particular security and privacy requirements of the finance industry.

Enterprise-Grade Security and Privacy

North continues Cohere’s long-standing commitment to building products with interoperability, security, and data privacy at their core.

All companies deal with sensitive data like emails, financial reports, and personal information where safeguards are paramount. North can be deployed securely in a company’s private cloud environment or on-premises, offering customers maximum control, security, and flexibility. Businesses can leverage North with confidence, knowing your data is never accessible outside your company.

Early Access Program

If you’re interested in learning about the early access program for North please reach out to the Cohere sales team for more information.

Source: Aidan Gomez, Cohere