Canada’s got a new homegrown AI tool that minds its own business… and yours.
What happened: After months of private rollouts with companies like Bell, RBC, and Dell, Toronto-based AI firm Cohere is opening up its workplace assistant to all businesses. The tool, called North, notably keeps all sensitive data in-house instead of on a Silicon Valley server.
- North lets companies build custom AI agents that are trained on internal data to tackle everything from job postings to financial reports.
- Cohere is pitching North as an AI Swiss Army knife for businesses that can’t afford (or bother) to use a bunch of AI tools that specialize in different areas, like coding or customer service.
Why it matters: For Canadian companies and government agencies that want the benefits of AI without handing off sensitive data to a U.S. tech giant, North could be a game-changer. Clients can host North on their own infrastructure, avoiding cloud platforms like Azure or AWS and the privacy concerns that come with them.
- That security is especially important for the federal government, which recently announced a partnership with Cohere to bring more AI tools into the public sector.
Bottom line: AI tools are only as good as the data that they’re given. By allowing organizations to safely open up their own databases, the AI tool can actually take care of the company-specific tasks that general chatbots like ChatGPT can’t do.—LA