What is new
Cohere released North 2 on Monday, the second version of its enterprise agent platform. Three things have changed in this release: agents keep context across sessions rather than starting from nothing each time; the orchestration harness was rebuilt to run multi-step processes on its own while pausing for designated human decisions; and administrators get granular controls over what agents cost to run.
The cost controls are the part most enterprise buyers have been asking for. North 2 adds per-user quotas, rate limits and organisation-wide caps, tracks token spending by user, by agent and by department, and fires alerts before a limit bites.
Memory, skills and a shared library
The memory feature is paired with a skills library of reusable agent capabilities and a shared repository so that an agent built from a prompt by one team can be used across the company. Cohere describes North 2 as its biggest upgrade yet, unifying security, intelligence, cost governance and full-stack control in one platform.
On security, the platform scans for personally identifiable information, detects prompt injection and enforces autonomy policies that limit what an agent is allowed to do. Cohere lists SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 27001 and ISO 42001 certifications. It runs on Cohere’s own models or on models the customer chooses.
Where it runs, and why that matters
North 2 deploys in the cloud, on premises, or fully air-gapped. That last option is the reason the product exists: the customers Cohere has been selling to — finance, healthcare, telecommunications, manufacturing, energy and the public sector — frequently cannot send data to a third-party endpoint at all.
Paul Teyssier, Cohere’s vice-president of product AI, led the launch. Jacob Rideout, chief technology officer of HiddenLayer, told VentureBeat that his team “only turned those workflows on once we could see and control what the agents were doing” — which is a fair summary of why spend caps and activity logs ship before new capabilities do.
Cohere has not published pricing; it says cost depends on scale and complexity. The company spent the past year rolling North out across those sectors, and says the production deployments shaped this version. The thing to watch is whether per-department token budgets become a standard line item in enterprise agent contracts, because once finance can see the number, it tends to want a ceiling on it. Agent spending has until now mostly been invisible inside a cloud bill.
