Cohere Launches North AI Agent Platform with On-Premise Security for Enterprises

Cohere has launched North, a new AI agent platform designed to address enterprise concerns around data security and privacy. As organizations increasingly explore AI tools to streamline workflows, many remain cautious—especially those in regulated industries or handling sensitive information—due to fears that their data could be exposed or used to train public AI models. North aims to solve this by enabling fully private, on-premise deployment. Unlike many AI platforms that rely on public cloud infrastructure like AWS or Azure, Cohere says North can run directly within a customer’s own environment—on-premise servers, hybrid clouds, virtual private clouds, or even air-gapped systems. Nick Frosst, Cohere’s co-founder and CEO, emphasized that North can operate on as few as two GPUs, making it accessible even for smaller deployments. “The LLMs are only as good as the data they have access to,” Frosst said during a demo. “If we want them to be truly useful, they need to be deployed where the data lives.” North is built to keep data within the organization’s firewall at all times. It does not send any customer data to Cohere’s servers or external systems. The platform includes advanced security features such as granular access controls, policies governing agent autonomy, continuous red-teaming for vulnerability testing, and third-party audits. It also complies with major international standards including GDPR, SOC-2, and ISO 27001. Beyond security, North offers a suite of enterprise-ready capabilities. It supports chat and search functions for handling customer support, summarizing meetings, drafting marketing content, and retrieving information from internal documents and the web. All outputs come with citations and transparent reasoning chains, allowing employees to verify and audit responses. The platform leverages Cohere’s existing technologies, including its Command family of generative models and Compass, a multimodal search stack. North runs a specialized version of Command optimized for enterprise reasoning and complex tasks. Frosst highlighted that North goes beyond simple Q&A. It can generate tables, documents, presentations, and conduct in-depth market research. This capability is bolstered by Cohere’s May acquisition of Ottogrid, a Vancouver-based company specializing in automated market intelligence tools. North integrates with key workplace tools such as Gmail, Slack, Salesforce, Outlook, and Linear, and supports the Model Context Protocol (MCP), enabling connections to custom or industry-specific applications. As users grow comfortable with the platform, Frosst described a natural progression from using North as an assistant to relying on it for automated workflows. Cohere, which has raised $970 million and recently valued at $5.5 billion, has already piloted North with major clients including RBC, Dell, LG, Ensemble Health Partners, and Palantir. The launch marks a strategic push to capture enterprise adoption by prioritizing security, control, and compliance—key barriers in the enterprise AI space.