Cohere introduces North 2 with memory, spend caps, and a redesigned harness

Cohere introduced North 2 on October 5, 2026, as an upgrade to its enterprise agent platform, not a model launch. The release leads with a redesigned orchestration harness, agents that keep context across sessions, and North Admin controls for quotas, rate limits, and organization-wide caps. Cohere says the platform can run in the cloud, on premises, or fully air-gapped — where the data already lives.

In its post, the company calls North 2 its biggest upgrade yet, bundling security, intelligence, cost governance, and full-stack control into one agentic platform. Cohere’s framing is that enterprises have been asked to trade one of those away to get the others.

A harness for shared, multi-step work

The new orchestration system is built to run complex, multi-step automations and agents, with people kept in the loop where a decision needs a human. Users build agents and automations from simple prompts, then share them across the organization instead of rebuilding the same workflow.

Cohere groups the additions this way:

Skills are reusable capabilities an agent can call, so the same logic is not rewritten for every employee.
Libraries hold shared knowledge and assets the organization can draw on.
Memory lets an agent keep context across sessions instead of starting cold.
Applications let users prototype decks, dashboards, documents, and lightweight apps from natural language, inside chat.
Automations add pre-built templates, a drag-and-drop workflow builder, real-time performance monitoring, and connections to tools already in use.

Paul Teyssier, VP, Product AI at Cohere, told VentureBeat that memory lets context persist longer across sub-sessions and agents. He did not give a figure for how much longer. He described the automation changes as enterprise-level controls and reporting as those workflows scale, not only as a way to make a process repeatable.

Cohere lists new connectors for Slack, SharePoint, OneDrive, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Exchange, Jira, Linear, Notion, and GitHub. Financial data providers — PitchBook, Crunchbase, Daloopa, FiscalAI, S&P Global, and FactSet, among others — are planned, not described as shipping.

Caps before the bill arrives

Cost governance sits in North Admin. Cohere says admins get granular cost controls, rate limits, user quotas, and organization-wide caps. They set roles and permissions, decide which models are used where and by whom, and monitor activity in real time, including token spend and limits. Flow control sets consumption tiers by request and token rates for users and groups. Alert thresholds can warn a team before a limit applies.

VentureBeat reports that usage can be broken down by model, user, and department and exported into a customer’s own analytics. SiliconANGLE reports that North Admin tracks token use to the individual user and agent, and that administrators can cap usage across the company.

Two figures are missing from the public materials. Cohere does not publish a price for North. It told VentureBeat that pricing depends on the scale and complexity of a deployment, including infrastructure, usage patterns, support, and customization. It also did not give VentureBeat performance benchmarks for North 2. Teyssier said application releases are harder to benchmark than models, and that Cohere is working on data it can share.

On hardware, Cohere says its models on NVIDIA Blackwell and Hopper generate more insights for fewer tokens, and that NVIDIA hardware with Cohere models increases tokens per second per node. Kari Briski, vice president of generative AI at NVIDIA, said Blackwell and Hopper accelerate inference for those models, “helping North 2.0 deliver more tokens for less.”

Bring a model; keep the data

North is model-agnostic: customers can use Cohere’s models or bring their own. Teyssier told VentureBeat that the model, harness, search, and embedding components are interchangeable, which Cohere positions as a way to reduce lock-in. That is a different claim from spend controls inside one vendor’s product. VentureBeat notes that Copilot Studio, ChatGPT Enterprise, and Claude Enterprise each let admins set consumption limits, but those limits govern usage on that provider’s own platform.

Deployment is a separate control, on the platform rather than on the harness alone. Cohere says North runs in the cloud, on premises, or fully air-gapped, and also lists self-hosted, VPC, hybrid, and on-premises environments. North Admin can enforce guardrails at the individual agent level. Autonomy policies are meant to restrict agents to authorized actions and send critical decisions to a person. The company cites SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 27001, and ISO 42001, plus ongoing testing that includes red-teaming and third-party vulnerability scanning. VentureBeat and SiliconANGLE report that the guardrails cover personally identifiable information in prompts and responses and attempted prompt injection.

VentureBeat tied the release to two of its July trackers: 21% of enterprises had only reactive monitoring of agent spend, with no real-time programmatic way to stop an agent before a budget-breaking bill, and 68% had traced a confidently wrong agent answer to missing or inconsistent business context in the prior six months.

North is not a new product name. VentureBeat dates the first announcement to January 2025. SiliconANGLE says the platform has been generally available since August 2025, and that a year of large production deployments — from finance to the public sector — shaped this upgrade.

A same-day alliance with PwC

The same day, PwC and Cohere announced a global alliance that starts in Canada. The newswire describes it as a strategic partnership, not a second product launch.

Cohere supplies North, its enterprise models, and search and retrieval. PwC identifies high-value uses, assesses risk and regulatory requirements, redesigns workflows, sets governance and controls, connects the technology to enterprise data and systems, and supports implementation. The release says clients can apply that to enterprise search, knowledge access, deep research, decision support, and task automation, including private-cloud, on-premises, and air-gapped deployments.

“Enterprises need AI that can deliver real capability without forcing them to give up control of their data, infrastructure or security,” Cohere co-founder and CEO Aidan Gomez said. Domenic Marino, senior partner and CEO of PwC Canada, said the pairing is meant to move clients from experimentation to measurable outcomes, particularly in regulated industries where trust and data sovereignty matter.

What the materials still do not say is how long cross-session memory lasts, how North 2 scores on a published benchmark, or what a given deployment costs.

If you are deciding whether shared agents can keep context and stay inside a token budget without leaving your environment, read Cohere’s North 2 post first, then the PwC release for how the Canada-first alliance splits platform from services. Cohere is taking demo requests through sales.