Cohere launches North 2: agents with memory, shared skills, and token budgets — plus a global PwC alliance starting in Canada

Cohere had a two-announcement Monday. The Toronto-headquartered lab shipped North 2, the biggest upgrade yet to its enterprise agentic AI platform — agents that remember context across sessions, share reusable skills and knowledge libraries, and run under granular token-spending caps. The same day, PwC and Cohere announced a global alliance, launching first in Canada, to carry sovereign enterprise AI into the regulated industries where AI pilots go to die.

The news landed in two parts on Monday. North 2 is the product: a redesigned agent orchestration harness at the core of Cohere’s enterprise platform, with cross-session memory, five named building blocks — Skills, Libraries, Memory, Applications, Automations — and North Admin cost controls that put token budgets on a dashboard. The PwC alliance is the distribution: a global partnership launching first in Canada that pairs Cohere’s platform with PwC’s transformation practice to move regulated clients from AI pilots to production.

What North 2 actually changes

The headline addition is memory: agents retain context across sessions instead of starting fresh each time — the difference between a genuinely useful workplace agent and a very good chatbot that greets you like a stranger every morning. Around it, Cohere has organized the platform into five building blocks. Skills are reusable capabilities agents can call on so employees don’t rebuild the same logic twice. Libraries hold shared knowledge and assets an entire organization draws from. Applications let users prototype and produce slide decks, dashboards, documents, and lightweight apps from plain-language requests. Automations supply pre-built templates for common processes, a drag-and-drop visual workflow builder, and real-time performance monitoring. That’s a deliberately end-user framing: Cohere is selling to the employee with a process to automate, not just the developer with an API key.

Notably, the platform is model-agnostic: organizations can run Cohere’s models or bring their own — and Cohere openly expects them to mix. Paul Teyssier, the company’s VP of product for AI, told The Logic that the company anticipates clients will keep using its tech for most of their regular AI applications but could choose alternatives for experimentation and niche tasks, MobileSyrup reports. That’s a confident posture from a model lab: the platform, not any single model, is the moat.

The budget cop: token spending as a feature

The other headline is cost governance. North Admin adds granular spending controls — rate limits, user quotas, and organization-wide caps — with alert thresholds that notify teams before limits are reached. Administrators get per-user and per-group visibility into token spend, according to Unite.AI’s breakdown. The release effectively turns FinOps into a checkbox.

It’s a direct answer to the enterprise AI complaint of the last two years: pilots are cheap, production is a runaway bill. If your AI strategy’s main risk metric is “who left an agent running over the weekend,” a budget cop built into the platform is a selling point, not a garnish.

Sovereignty is the product

Cohere’s pitch to regulated industries remains deployment flexibility: North 2 runs self-hosted, in a virtual private cloud, hybrid, on-premises, or fully air-gapped. The platform carries SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 27001, and ISO 42001 certifications, with agent-level guardrails that filter content and validate responses, autonomy policies that restrict agents to authorized actions and seek human oversight for critical decisions, and continual security testing including red-teaming and third-party vulnerability scanning.

New enterprise connectors link North to Slack, SharePoint, OneDrive, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Exchange, Jira, Linear, Notion, and GitHub, with financial data connectors to PitchBook, Crunchbase, Daloopa, FiscalAI, S&P Global, and FactSet planned. Cohere says the past year of rolling North out across finance, healthcare, telecommunications, manufacturing, energy, and the public sector shaped this version — production deployments, not demos.

The customer names tell the story Cohere wants told. LG CNS uses North to bring AI to customers at scale across South Korea — Yohan Jin, head of the AI center, said the platform gives enterprises “a secure, practical foundation for turning agentic AI into real business value.” Bell Cyber is partnering to bring government-grade security to agentic AI, with CTO and AI officer Jawed Ahmad saying it lets his organization apply agentic AI inside security operations while maintaining control, privacy, and data sovereignty. And NVIDIA is in the mix too: Cohere says its collaboration found North generates more insights for fewer tokens on NVIDIA Blackwell and Hopper hardware, with NVIDIA’s Kari Briski, VP of generative AI, noting organizations require control over where their AI workloads live.

The PwC alliance: from pilots to production

The second announcement is about distribution. The PwC–Cohere global alliance — announced via a joint release on Monday and detailed on Cohere’s blog — pairs Cohere’s North platform, enterprise models, and search and retrieval capabilities with PwC’s industry, risk, regulatory, technology, and transformation expertise.

The framing is deliberately boring, which is the point. PwC will help clients identify high-value uses, assess risk and regulatory requirements, redesign workflows, establish governance and controls, connect the technology to enterprise data and systems, and support implementation at scale. Target workloads: enterprise search, knowledge access, deep research, decision support, and task automation — the unglamorous core of knowledge work, and exactly where pilots stall.

The quotes are on-message. “AI has the potential to reshape how organizations operate and create value, but realizing that potential requires more than technology,” said Domenic Marino, senior partner and CEO of PwC Canada. Cohere co-founder and CEO Aidan Gomez: “Enterprises need AI that can deliver real capability without forcing them to give up control of their data, infrastructure or security.” And PwC Canada CTO Annie Veillet: “Building trust in AI starts with ensuring it operates securely within an organization’s own technology and data environments, with clear governance, explainability, and human oversight built in from the start.”

The numbers behind the two companies: Cohere, founded in 2019, has raised roughly $1.6 billion USD from Nvidia, AMD Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Oracle, Cisco, plus institutional investors including Radical Ventures, Inovia Capital, PSP Investments, HOOPP, and BDC — and AI pioneers Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, Pieter Abbeel, and Raquel Urtasun. It is headquartered globally in Toronto, San Francisco, and Germany, with offices in London, New York, Montreal, Paris, and Seoul. PwC Canada counts more than 6,500 partners and staff across the country.

Why the pairing matters

Read together, the two announcements are a single thesis. Cohere is not trying to out-chatbot OpenAI or out-reason Anthropic. Its bet is that the enterprise AI market is won on control: where data lives, what agents are allowed to do, and what it all costs. North 2 is the product expression of that thesis; PwC is the distribution expression — a consultancy already sitting inside the boardrooms of the banks, insurers, and government agencies Cohere wants as customers.

It’s also a distinctly Canadian story. Cohere’s global HQ includes Toronto with a Montreal office, the alliance launches first in Canada, and PwC Canada’s 6,500-person network is the beachhead. For a lab that calls itself the world’s leading sovereign AI company, starting at home is both symbolism and strategy: if deploy-anywhere AI can’t win in a country with some of the world’s strictest data-residency expectations, it can’t win anywhere.

One to watch: the timing lands two weeks after Bell Cyber and Cohere’s sovereign AI security partnership — a story we covered in September — which suggests the pipeline of Canadian enterprise deals is already moving. The question now is whether North 2’s memory and spending caps are enough to turn “secure by default” from a pitch into a habit. The alliance details are in the joint release; North 2 is broken down in full by Unite.AI.