Toronto-based generative artificial intelligence (AI) startup Cohere has launched an early access program for North, its new AI workspace platform that serves as an answer to Microsoft Copilot and Google Vertex AI.
Cohere claims North outperforms both Microsoft Copilot and Google Vertex AI in retrieval-augmented generation.
Cohere claims the new platform can integrate with “any tool a business cares about,” including in-house applications, allowing employees to easily create, customize, and share AI agents “with just a few clicks.”
AI agents are programs that collect and use data to perform virtual tasks outlined by users which, in North’s case, can include business functions in HR, finance, customer support, and IT.
For example, Cohere claims an employee could use North to create a specific agent that searches a connected application or dataset, such as Slack or an Excel spreadsheet, in order to summarize messages or create a data visualization.
Cohere also frames the platform as security-focused, claiming North combines large language models (LLMs), search, and agents into one platform designed to run in “private–including air-gapped–environments.” In other words, North is designed to be able to search, interpret, and complete tasks based on data in computer systems that can’t connect to the internet.
“North gets rid of the pain that enterprises get stuck in during their AI adoption process, providing near-immediate productivity benefits to the workforce,” Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez claimed in a LinkedIn post announcing the launch. “All while being completely privately deployable, just about anywhere.”
North is launching alongside a counterpart for financial services, which Cohere developed in collaboration with RBC. Cohere said the platform, North for Banking, will integrate Cohere and RBC’s proprietary foundation models, alongside the bank’s internal platforms, to accelerate the development of generative AI solutions at RBC.
Cohere claims North outperforms both Microsoft Copilot and Google Vertex AI in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)—the ability to fetch accurate and relevant answers from a dataset—as well as enterprise employee use cases and experience. The benchmark tests comparing the platforms were based on LlamaIndex tests and human evaluation.
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Founded in 2019 by former Google researchers, Cohere builds large-language models that power chatbots and other generative AI applications. Unlike some of its rivals, which include OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, and Google, Cohere caters exclusively to businesses and has no direct-to-consumer generative AI product analogous to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
The startup closed a $500-million USD Series D round at a $5.5-billion valuation in July 2024, making it one of Canada’s most valuable tech startups. Japanese IT services company Fujitsu participated in the round as part of a partnership between the two companies to develop a Japanese LLM for private cloud usage, which launched in October.
Cohere was also the first beneficiary of the federal government’s $2-billion Canadian Sovereign AI Compute Strategy this past December, receiving $240 million CAD to build a multibillion-dollar AI data centre in Canada.
Feature image courtesy Cohere.