Canadian artificial intelligence company Cohere has introduced its latest innovation, North, a new AI agent platform designed specifically to address enterprise and government concerns around data security and privacy. As organisations grow increasingly cautious about integrating AI due to the risks of exposing sensitive or proprietary data, North provides a solution that ensures their information remains protected within their own infrastructure.
Unveiled by Cohere’s co-founder and CEO Nick Frosst, the platform enables private, secure deployment of large language model tools behind company firewalls. “LLMs are only as good as the data they have access to,” Frosst said during a demonstration. “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 most AI platforms that rely on external cloud providers, Cohere’s North can be deployed directly on on-premise systems, virtual private clouds, hybrid environments, or even air-gapped systems, allowing organisations complete control over their data. Frosst noted that North can operate with minimal hardware, stating, “We can deploy literally on a GPU in a closet that they might have somewhere.”
North has been built with enterprise-grade security, offering granular access controls, autonomous agent policies, continuous red-teaming, and third-party security audits. It also complies with major global standards, including GDPR, SOC-2, and ISO 27001.
Backed by $970 million in funding and last valued at $5.5 billion, Cohere has already piloted North with a number of well-known organisations, including RBC, Dell, LG, Ensemble Health Partners, and Palantir.
The North platform features AI-powered chat and search capabilities, built on Cohere’s proprietary Command and Compass technologies. These tools enable tasks such as answering customer queries, summarising meetings, creating documents, generating marketing content, and conducting internal and external research. All outputs include citations and transparent reasoning trails, allowing users to validate results easily.
“It goes beyond just Q&A and gets into doing work for you,” Frosst explained. “It can make tables, it can make documents, it can make slideshows. It can do a bunch of market research.”
In May, Cohere acquired Ottogrid, a Vancouver-based platform that automates complex market research tasks. This acquisition further strengthens North’s capabilities in delivering insightful business intelligence.
North also seamlessly integrates with widely used enterprise applications such as Gmail, Slack, Salesforce, Outlook, and Linear, and supports connection with Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers for deeper customisation in specialised industries.
Frosst added, “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.”
Cohere’s North sets a new benchmark for AI deployment in sensitive and regulated environments, promising enterprises secure, intelligent automation without compromising control or confidentiality.
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