Cohere on October 5, 2026 unveiled North 2, which the Toronto-based AI company calls the biggest upgrade yet to North, its platform for building and running AI agents inside large organizations. In its primary announcement, Cohere framed the release around a tradeoff it says enterprises have been forced to accept when deploying agents: choosing a platform that is secure, capable, or affordable to govern, but rarely all three. North has been generally available since August 2025, and Cohere said a year of production deployments across finance, healthcare, telecommunications, manufacturing, energy, and the public sector shaped the new version.
At the center of North 2 is a redesigned agent harness, an orchestration system meant to carry out multi-step processes on its own while routing designated decisions to a human for sign-off. Users can build agents and automations from plain-language prompts and share them across an organization so other teams do not rebuild the same workflow. Cohere added reusable skills that agents can call, shared libraries of company knowledge and assets, and memory that lets agents keep context across sessions instead of starting fresh each time. The platform can also prototype decks, dashboards, documents, and lightweight apps from chat, offers automation templates and a drag-and-drop workflow builder, and adds connectors to tools such as Slack, SharePoint, OneDrive, Outlook, Jira, Linear, Notion, and GitHub, with financial data providers including PitchBook, S&P Global, and FactSet planned.
The most concrete change for budget owners sits in North Admin, the platform's management console. Administrators can now see usage and token spend down to the user and agent level, define consumption tiers by request and token rates for users and groups, set organization-wide caps, and configure alerts that warn teams before limits apply. North 2 is model-agnostic, so customers can run Cohere's models or bring their own, and it continues to deploy in the cloud, in a customer's virtual private cloud, on premises, or fully air-gapped. Security features include guardrails that screen prompts and responses for personal data and prompt injection, autonomy policies that confine agents to authorized actions, and SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 27001, and ISO 42001 certifications. Cohere named LG CNS and Bell Cyber among North users and said its work with NVIDIA on Blackwell and Hopper GPUs raises tokens per second per node for Cohere models.
SiliconANGLE and VentureBeat independently reported the launch on October 5, describing the same orchestration redesign, memory and shared-library features, and per-user and per-agent spending controls. VentureBeat noted that Cohere did not provide performance benchmarks for North 2 and does not publish pricing, saying instead that costs depend on the scale and complexity of each deployment. SiliconANGLE noted the release comes less than three weeks after Cohere signed a merger agreement with German AI developer Aleph Alpha, a deal that remains subject to regulatory approval.
DigiEditorial verified the launch against Cohere's October 5 North 2 announcement as the primary source, with corroboration from SiliconANGLE and VentureBeat. Feature descriptions, customer names, certifications, and NVIDIA efficiency claims are company disclosures or secondary reporting of those disclosures. Cohere has not released benchmarks or public pricing for North 2, and DigiEditorial has not independently tested the platform.