The Pulse
Cohere Adds Agent Memory and Spending Caps to North 2
Cohere’s North 2 adds cross-session agent memory, reusable workflows and controls for limiting AI usage by user, group and organization. The enterprise platform also supports customer-selected models and cloud, on-premises and air-gapped de
AI.info Team · Written with AI ·
One in five enterprises in a July survey had no real-time way to stop an AI agent from running up a bill before the charge arrived. Cohere is targeting that cost-control gap with North 2, announced October 5, adding spending limits alongside memory that carries agent context across sessions. The survey covered 107 organizations with at least 100 employees, and its respondents were self-selected, so the figure describes that group rather than the whole enterprise market. North 2 also lets companies share agents and workflows instead of rebuilding them team by team.
North 2 puts token limits in administrators’ hands
North Admin gives administrators controls to set user quotas, rate limits and organization-wide caps. Teams can define consumption tiers by request and token rates for individuals or groups, monitor activity down to a user or agent, and set alerts to warn before a limit applies. The console also manages roles, permissions and which models teams can use. Those features make agent spending easier to observe and constrain, though Cohere has not published performance benchmarks for the updated platform.
North 2 is designed to work with Cohere’s models or models a customer already uses. That choice is significant for organizations wary of tying workflows to a single model provider: Cohere says the platform’s models, orchestration system, search and embedding components can be changed independently. Its deployment options include cloud, on-premises and fully air-gapped environments, giving customers different ways to keep data and systems within their own infrastructure.
Shared memory meets reusable agents
The release also adds memory that lets agents retain context between sessions, alongside libraries where teams can store shared knowledge and assets. Employees can build agents and automations from prompts, then share them across the organization. Reusable skills let agents call capabilities that teams would otherwise have to recreate, while a visual workflow builder and templates support recurring processes.
Cohere also lists document and app creation from natural-language requests, with prototypes for items such as decks, dashboards and lightweight applications. New connectors include Slack, SharePoint, OneDrive, Outlook, Exchange, Jira, Linear, Notion and GitHub. Connectors for financial data providers including PitchBook, Crunchbase, Daloopa, FiscalAI, S&P Global and FactSet are described as planned, not already available.
Customers still need evidence on cost and results
Cohere presents North 2 as a way to run agents with stronger organizational controls, rather than as a model-performance upgrade. The company’s announcement does not report benchmark results for the platform. VentureBeat reported that Cohere had not provided benchmarks and did not publish North pricing; the company told the outlet that deployment cost depends on scale and complexity, including infrastructure, usage, support and customization.
A customer endorsement in Cohere’s announcement points to the value it sees in those controls. “North gives enterprises a secure, practical foundation for turning agentic AI into real business value,” said Yohan Jin, head of the AI Center at LG CNS. Cohere says LG CNS uses North internally and brings it to customers in South Korea, but the announcement offers no quantified results from those deployments.
Governance is part of the product pitch
North Admin’s cost controls sit alongside security features Cohere describes, including agent-level guardrails for filtering content and checking model responses. Autonomy policies can restrict agents to authorized actions and route critical decisions to human reviewers. Cohere also says North holds SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 27001 and ISO 42001 certifications.
The launch addresses a measurable weakness: the July VentureBeat survey found 21% of respondents relied on post-hoc logs without a real-time way to halt runaway agent use. Whether North 2’s controls reduce unexpected costs will depend on how customers configure limits and how well those limits fit real workflows. Cohere publishes no fixed price for North, leaving deployment quotes—and independent evidence of cost or performance gains—as concrete details prospective buyers must seek from the company.