Cohere's North 2 agent platform adds shared skills, access controls and token limits

Cohere announced North 2 on 5 October 2026, describing it as the biggest upgrade yet to its North enterprise agent platform. The company says the release combines security, intelligence, cost governance and deployment control in one product.

The central change, according to Cohere, is a redesigned agent orchestration system meant to run more sophisticated multi-step automations and agents. The Register, which covered the launch independently the same day, described it as a revamp of the North agent harness, which it says launched early last year, aimed at collaboration, access control, token spend and security.

Much of what is new concerns reuse. Cohere says users can create agents and automations that are shared across an organization, supported by skills, libraries of shared knowledge, memory that persists across sessions, and templates plus a drag-and-drop workflow builder. The Register likened skills to written procedures for an agent and automations to customizable templates, and said the memory feature lets agents keep context between sessions. Cohere lists new connectors including Slack, SharePoint, Outlook, Jira, Linear, Notion and GitHub, and says financial-data connectors are planned rather than available.

On governance, Cohere says its North Admin tool can show usage down to the user and agent level and set consumption tiers based on request and token rates. The Register reported that administrators can attach access control lists to libraries and skills, and that the flow-control features should show which departments use the most tokens.

Cohere says North 2 is model agnostic, so customers can use its models or their own, and can be deployed self-hosted, in a virtual private cloud, hybrid, on-premises or air-gapped. It lists SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 27001 and ISO 42001 certifications.

What is confirmed and what is not: the launch and feature list come from Cohere and are echoed by The Register, which does not appear to have tested the product. Cohere also says its models on NVIDIA hardware deliver more insight for fewer tokens, but the post gives no benchmark figures, and neither source gives pricing. Those performance, cost and certification claims are the company's own.

For enterprise buyers, the practical question is whether shared skills, per-agent guardrails and spend limits make agents easier to govern at scale, a question the many competing enterprise agent platforms are also trying to answer.

Revised 16 October 2026: Guth re-read the original sources and rewrote this article. The earlier version remains available as revision 1.