Cohere Ships North 2 Agent Platform and Signs PwC Alliance
Cohere had a busy start to the week. The Toronto-based model developer is releasing North 2, a new version of its enterprise AI platform, and on October 5 it announced a global alliance with PwC that will launch first in Canada. Both moves target banks, insurers, telecoms and government departments that want tight control over their data.
According to The Globe and Mail, the first version of North, released last year, worked largely as a chatbot that could search internal documents and run a few automated workflows. Chief AI officer Joëlle Pineau told the paper that North 2 adds the features needed for agentic behaviour, so customers can build agents for multistep work such as resolving customer issues, running financial analysis and writing code. At the core is what the industry calls an agent harness, the layer that manages agents and connects them to other applications. “The model is like the engine, and the harness is like the vehicle,” Pineau said.
Cohere named Bell Canada, LG CNS and Dell as North customers but would not say how many it has in total. The platform is model-agnostic, and Pineau said a sizable portion of revenue comes from the harness itself.
What it means in practice
The PwC deal is about getting those agents into production. Under the alliance, described in the companies’ joint release on Newswire, Cohere supplies North, its enterprise models and its search and retrieval tools, while PwC helps clients pick high-value uses, assess regulatory and risk requirements, redesign workflows and set up governance. Domenic Marino, CEO of PwC Canada, said the aim is to help clients move “from experimentation to measurable outcomes,” particularly in regulated industries.
Security is the selling point. The Globe notes that AI agents have made headlines for misbehaving during evaluations, and Cohere says North lets customers restrict agents to authorised actions, require human sign-off on critical tasks, limit the data they can reach and cap spending. Readers following Cohere’s Canadian deployments will recognise the pattern, from Bell Cyber’s sovereign AI for security investigations to TD’s $25 million collaboration with Cohere and Layer 6.
Open questions remain. Cohere is far smaller than OpenAI, Anthropic and Microsoft, all of which are courting the same buyers, and the alliance announcement names no clients or targets. What to watch: which Canadian organisations sign on first and whether PwC publishes results from early deployments.