AI agent tools promise to siphon out some of the drudgery from daily workflows, but most organizations are hesitant to adopt them yet, harboring a pressing concern: data security. Large enterprises with trade secrets, companies in highly regulated industries, and government agencies have thought more than twice about bringing in AI tools out of concern that their — or worse, their customers’ — data could inadvertently be compromised, or used to train foundation models.
Canadian AI firm Cohere is taking aim at alleviating those concerns with its new AI agent platform dubbed North, which promises to enable private deployment so that enterprises and governments can keep their and customers’ data safe behind their own firewalls.
“LLMs are only as good as the data they have access to,” Nick Frosst, co-founder and CEO of Cohere, said during a demo of North. “If we want LLMs to be as useful as possible, they have to access that useful data, and that means they need to be deployed in [the customer’s] environment.”
Instead of using enterprise cloud platforms like Azure or AWS, Cohere says it can install North on an organization’s private infrastructure so that it never sees or interacts with a customer’s data. North can run on an organization’s on-premise infrastructure, hybrid clouds, VPCs, or air-gapped environments, Frosst said.
“We can deploy literally on a GPU in a closet that they might have somewhere,” he explained, adding that North was designed to run on as few as two GPUs.
Cohere claims North also includes security protocols like granular access control, agent autonomy policies, continuous red-teaming, and third-party security tests. And, it meets international compliance standards like GDPR, SOC-2, and ISO 27001.
More than private deployments
Image Credits:Cohere
Cohere, which has so far raised $970 million, most recently at a $5.5 billion valuation, said it has already piloted Nort …