New agentic AI platform promises data privacy, auditability, and seamless integration into enterprise workflows
Cohere, a Toronto-based AI company known for its enterprise language models, has announced the general availability of North, its new AI agent platform built specifically for secure enterprise environments. The release positions Cohere as a serious player in the agentic AI space, offering businesses an alternative to consumer-focused generative AI tools that often raise concerns around data security, compliance, and customization.
Unveiled on August 6, Cohere North is designed to help businesses automate complex workflows using AI agents while keeping sensitive internal data private. The company says North has been developed in close collaboration with large enterprise customers and addresses long-standing concerns over how generative AI tools handle proprietary information.
AI Agents Purpose-Built for the Enterprise
Unlike public-facing chatbots like ChatGPT or Gemini, North is built as a modular, secure AI agent system that can interact with internal company data, tools, and APIs without exposing any information externally. The platform allows businesses to deploy AI agents that can execute tasks across departments such as HR, customer service, finance, and IT—handling tasks like summarizing documents, updating CRMs, or answering policy-related queries autonomously.
Cohere's co-founder and CEO Aidan Gomez described the launch as a turning point in how generative AI is operationalized across enterprises. “North was created to bridge the trust gap between AI systems and real-world business processes. It’s not about flashy demos—it’s about reliability, privacy, and getting things done at scale,” Gomez said in a company blog post.
Data Never Leaves the Enterprise Perimeter
A key feature of Cohere North is its data locality assurance. The platform is deployable within a company’s virtual private cloud (VPC), ensuring that sensitive internal documents, employee data, or financial records remain behind corporate firewalls at all times.
This architecture helps North meet critical enterprise compliance requirements such as SOC 2, GDPR, HIPAA, and ISO certifications—factors often cited as deal-breakers for AI adoption in heavily regulated sectors like healthcare, banking, and government.
Cohere says North’s agentic AI operates on customer-specific instructions and logs every action for full traceability, enabling audit trails that can be reviewed internally. This level of oversight is expected to give enterprises a higher degree of confidence in AI-driven decision-making.
Agentic AI That Plays Well With Enterprise Tools
North’s modular design allows it to be integrated with enterprise software stacks such as Salesforce, Microsoft 365, SAP, and custom APIs. The agents can be trained on internal knowledge bases and business logic, reducing reliance on generic internet data that can be outdated or irrelevant.
Early beta testers have reportedly used North to automate customer support ticket resolutions, employee onboarding processes, and even financial forecasting. Agents can be assigned long-running tasks, make multi-step decisions, and escalate to human supervisors when thresholds are met.
The platform includes an agent orchestration engine that coordinates tasks across multiple AI agents, and a policy layer that defines exactly what actions each agent is permitted to take.
Performance Built on Command R
North is powered by Cohere's Command R series of language models, which are fine-tuned for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) tasks—a method that enables AI models to fetch relevant context from connected databases in real time.
Command R has gained a reputation in the industry for its focus on grounding, citation, and data integrity, making it suitable for enterprise applications where factual accuracy is paramount.
Cohere North leverages these capabilities while also enabling businesses to plug in their own retrieval systems or connect to external vector databases such as Pinecone or Weaviate.
A Clear Focus on the Enterprise Segment
Cohere’s North distinguishes itself by deliberately not targeting consumer use cases. Unlike ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity, North is not meant to be a general-purpose chatbot. Instead, it is positioned as a business-first, policy-safe agent framework designed for practical, secure deployment.
This is in line with Cohere’s long-standing strategy of focusing solely on enterprise-grade AI solutions rather than competing for consumer attention.
“We want to make the boring stuff go away,” said Ivan Zhang, VP of Product at Cohere, highlighting the tool’s ability to streamline repetitive administrative work while maintaining full visibility and control.
What’s for Future
As enterprises become increasingly cautious about AI risks, platforms like North could become the blueprint for how generative AI is implemented in real-world businesses. With its strong emphasis on data governance, privacy, and customization, Cohere is betting that trust—not just performance—will be the deciding factor in enterprise AI adoption.
With the release of North, Cohere joins a growing wave of companies including Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google in offering agentic AI systems—but with a sharp focus on private, enterprise-only deployments.