The Globe and Mail reports in its Monday edition that Cohere Inc. is releasing a new version of its North artificial-intelligence platform in a bid to win more corporate and government customers in the fiercely competitive market for enterprise AI applications. The Globe's Joe Castaldo writes the Toronto-based company, which builds large language models, released the first version of North last year. Cohere chief AI officer Joëlle Pineau said the initial version functioned largely as a chatbot that could pull internal documents and handle some automated workflows. "It was essentially a generative model," Ms. Pineau said. "Today, we've actually put in a lot of the features that allow agentic behaviour." Customers can use the latest version, called North 2, to build agents to carry out more complex multistep actions, such as resolving customer issues, conducting financial analysis and coding. Ms. Pineau said some features of North 2 have already been shipped to customers. North acts as a kind of software layer around AI models, and at its core is what's called an agent harness, an increasingly common term in the industry. Cohere has scored BCE's Bell Canada, LG CNS Co. Ltd. and Dell Inc. as North customers.