Cohere offers to put agents in lockdown mode with strict ACLs

Cohere, a Canadian model development company, is offering enterprises a safer and more consistent experience with its revamped North agent harness. Launched earlier last year, the platform has been updated to improve collaboration, access control, token spend, and overall security. Cohere's North 2 is specifically designed to integrate with existing knowledge bases and SaaS applications, enabling automation of various business processes.

Among the new features introduced with North 2 are skills, libraries, and automations. Skills are essentially standard operating procedures that document how the agent harness should complete tasks. They are often generated by working with the agent, completing a task, and documenting the most efficient steps to achieve the desired outcome. Cohere has made it easier for users to share these skills, reducing the time spent reinventing the wheel and improving consistency by minimizing different routes to achieving goals.

To facilitate the creation of new skills, North 2 also introduces automations, which are generic templates that can be customized using a drag-and-drop graphical interface. This is similar to LangFlow, which was looked at earlier this year. Additionally, North 2 includes libraries to ensure that agents are working off of the same datasets, promoting consistency in the data used by agents.

Memory, a core feature of most modern agent harnesses, is also added to North 2, allowing agents to maintain context across multiple sessions. These features can be seen as self-generating macros, but they work across multiple applications and data sources.

Sovereign AI, a concept that emphasizes deploying agent harnesses based on individual enterprise preferences, is a significant talking point for Cohere. Enterprises can choose to deploy North 2 on-premises in an air-gapped environment or in the cloud, depending on their needs. Alongside these new features aimed at collaboration and automation, North 2 also implements guardrails to help enterprises manage token spend and access controls.

Flow control functionality promises greater visibility into which departments are using the most tokens, while access control functionality allows admins to assign access control lists to various libraries and skills. This ensures that interns cannot gain access to proprietary data just because they request it. North 2 represents the latest in a series of enterprise-focused agentic AI platforms that have been rolled out over the past year as major and minor cloud providers introduce tailored agent harnesses to meet enterprise needs.