Canadian artificial-intelligence start-up Cohere on Wednesday made its agentic AI platform, dubbed North, generally available to enterprise and government customers. The release follows a months-long pilot with clients including Royal Bank of Canada, Dell Technologies and LG CNS, and marks the Toronto-based company’s most ambitious bid yet to position itself as a secure alternative to large cloud-hosted AI services. North can be installed on an organisation’s own infrastructure—including air-gapped servers—or deployed across hybrid clouds and virtual private clouds, allowing sensitive data to remain behind corporate firewalls. Cohere says the system can run on as few as two GPUs and ships with granular access controls, agent-autonomy policies, ongoing red-team testing and compliance with GDPR, SOC-2 and ISO 27001 standards. The platform combines chat and search functions powered by a variant of Cohere’s Command large-language model, enabling tasks such as drafting documents, summarising meetings and generating market-research tables, all with citations and reasoning chains for auditability. Cohere, which has raised US$970 million and was last valued at US$5.5 billion, is opening additional offices in Montreal and Seoul as it seeks to expand sales of North across North America, Europe and Asia.