AI agents are here. Here's how AI startup Cohere is deploying them for consultants and other businesses.
Cohere
- Enterprise AI startup Cohere has launched a new platform called North.
- North allows users to quickly deploy AI agents to execute tasks across various business sectors.
- The company says the platform cuts the time it takes to complete a task by over five-fold.
2025 is shaping up to be the year that AI "agents" go mainstream.
Unlike AI-based chatbots that respond to user queries, agents are AI tools that work autonomously. They can execute tasks and make decisions, and companies are already using them for everything from creating marketing campaigns to recruiting new employees.
Cohere, an AI startup focused on enterprise technology, unveiled North on Thursday — an all-in-one platform combining large language models, multimodal search, and agents to help its customers work more efficiently with AI.
Through North, users can quickly customize and deploy AI agents to find relevant information, conduct research, and execute tasks across various business functions.
The platform could make it easier for a company's finance team, for example, to quickly search through internal data sources and create reports. Its multimodal search function could also help extract information from everything from images to slides to spreadsheets.
AI agents built with North integrate with a company's existing workplace tools and applications. The platform can run in private, allowing organizations to integrate all their sensitive data in one place securely.
"North allows employees to build AI agents tailored to their role to execute complex tasks without ever leaving the platform," a representative for Cohere told Business Insider by email.
The company is now deploying North to a small set of companies in finance, healthcare, and critical infrastructure as it continues to refine the platform. There is no set date for when it will make the platform available more widely.
Cohere, launched in 2019 by Aidan Gomez, Ivan Zhang, and Nick Frosst, has quickly grown to rival ChatGPT maker OpenAI and was valued at over $5.5 billion at its Series D funding round announced last July, Bloomberg reported. As of last March, the company had an annualized revenue of $35 million, up from $13 million at the end of 2023.
The company is one of a few AI startups that are building their own large language models from the ground up. Unlike its competitors, it has focused on creating customized solutions for businesses rather than consumer apps or the more nebulous goal of artificial general intelligence.
Its partners include major companies like software company Oracle, IT company Fujitsu, and consulting firm McKinsey & Company.
This year, however, its goal is to "move beyond generic LLMs towards tuned and highly optimized end-to-end solutions that address the specific objectives of a business," Gomez said in a post on LinkedIn outlining the company's objectives for 2025.