Cohere, a large language model (LLM) provider, has launched North, a low-code platform designed to enable enterprises to build and deploy AI agents across various business functions. This move positions North as a competitor to Microsoft's autonomous agents, Google's Vertex AI agents, and Salesforce's Agentforce.

The North platform, currently available as part of an early access program, allows enterprises to create agents that can find relevant information across global knowledge repositories in multiple languages, conduct research and analysis, and perform complex tasks spanning various lines of business. According to Cohere, these agents can be used for core business functions like HR, finance, customer support, and IT, enabling teams to execute faster and achieve more.

The tech stack behind North is built around Cohere's proprietary multimodal AI search and discovery framework, Compass. Compass combines retrieval models, document parsing abilities, and a managed index to support the creation of AI agents. The document parsing ability is particularly noteworthy, as it can pre-process documents and support various formats, including PDF, PPT, DOCX, and XLSX.

The ability to support different formats is crucial, according to Aidan Gomez, CEO and co-founder of Cohere, as extracting information from fragmented data is essential for any AI system. The managed index inside Compass works like a managed service, improving performance and reducing latency.

Security is also a key aspect of North, with a system that can integrate an enterprise's identity and access management rules. This feature is particularly important for regulated industries, where companies cannot risk leaking sensitive data. The Royal Bank of Canada is already an early customer of North, co-developing a North for Banking offering with Cohere.

Cohere is positioning North as a solution to the growing concern among developers about the ease of building and deploying AI agents. A survey by IBM involving over 1,000 enterprises revealed that 31% of developers are concerned about the trustworthiness of AI agents, while 23% and 22% are concerned about cybersecurity threats and agents losing visibility into systems, respectively.

North is not the only platform focusing on ease of use. Salesforce recently unveiled Agentforce 2.0, an updated low-code agentic platform with an improved reasoning engine and new agentic skills. Microsoft has also upgraded Copilot Studio, its agent-building platform, to allow enterprises to connect agents to third-party applications.

Despite the competition, Cohere claims that North can be integrated "seamlessly" into any existing workflow out-of-the-box. According to Gomez, AI agents created with North can quickly and easily connect to the workplace tools and applications that employees regularly use. However, the exact integration process remains unclear.

As the AI agent market continues to evolve, it will be interesting to see how North and its competitors fare. One thing is certain – the demand for low-code, easy-to-use AI agent platforms is growing, and Cohere's North is well-positioned to capitalize on this trend.