Cohere’s agentic AI platform North gets wide release, aims to handle ‘boring’ work

Mirko Bibic, president and CEO, BCE and Aidan Gomez, Co-Founder and CEO, Cohere, announce a strategic partnership to deliver sovereign AI solutions to government and business on Monday.

Cohere is making its agentic artificial intelligence platform more widely available.

The Toronto-based tech firm announced Wednesday that its North platform, which was launched in a limited fashion in January, is getting a broader release.

The platform is already in use at Bell, Royal Bank of Canada and Dell.

North can help companies summarize meetings, punch up marketing copy, answer customer support inquiries, draft financial reports and more.

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“It is a tool for augmenting and automating all of the work you do behind a computer that you would rather not do,” said Cohere co-founder Nick Frosst.

Agentic AI systems like North have been heralded as the next frontier for AI innovation and positioned as a booster of workplace productivity because they’re essentially advanced software programs designed to independently reason, access information from various sources and execute intricate tasks.

Frosst uses North on a daily basis for “the boring work, the monotonous work, the bureaucratic work.” With North doing those tasks, Frosst said anything “distinctly human” is left for him.

North came in handy recently when he was at an esports tournament and learned he was about to meet the CEO of a company Cohere had worked with four years ago.

Usually, he’d have time to research the relationship between the businesses or ask staff to compile some notes, but with only a few minutes notice, he said he turned to North to put together a list of bullet points summarizing the companies’ history.

Frosst said it can just as easily be used to complete tasks such as crafting descriptions for job postings.

North is able to do these tasks because users give the large language models (LLMs), which underpin the platform, access to their existing data and workspaces including Gmail, Slack, Salesforce and Outlook.

“LLMs are only as good as the data they have access to,” Frosst explained.

While companies often eschew AI systems because they need to limit who can access proprietary data, Frosst said North is different.

“We can pull from wherever your data is but keep it in your environment so that we do not see it and that’s pretty differentiated,” he said.

The system can be set up within a company’s environment and lets firms granularly dictate access, so users can be selective about what platforms North can reach and Cohere can ensure other users can’t get ahold of someone’s data once it’s being used by North.

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The tool is also designed so it will only take actions that are authorized and will always seek human oversight for critical decisions or actions.

While people may worry agentic AI systems will render a lot of jobs or tasks unnecessary, Frosst stresses North is designed to take the sting out of laborious tasks and give humans more time for creative, interesting work.

For the vast majority of users, he said North can only augment and automate “a relatively small percentage” of the work done behind a computer.

“There are not many jobs that this automates entirely,” he said.

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CTV News and BNN Bloomberg are owned by Bell Media, which is a division of BCE.

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Tara Deschamps, The Canadian Press

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 6, 2025.