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Upstarts · 3 min · Apr 16, 2026

North lets staff build automations without creating a new product

Aidan Gomez · Co-founder & CEO, Cohere

Aidan Gomez says North lets nontechnical staff make chat-based automations using approved tools and authentication.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 30:18Cohere chose independence over the easier growth path5 min
  2. 21:48Gomez sees AI-driven growth as a defense against scarcity4 min
  3. 25:13AI sovereignty depends on a diverse supply of providers4 min
  4. 36:31Cohere keeps humans involved in sensitive AI decisions3 min
  5. 4:13North lets staff build automations without creating a new product3 min
  6. 18:49Cohere began with a bet on training a model on the whole web2 min
  7. 8:17Rural internet scarcity led Gomez into hands-on AI research5 min
  8. 39:33Gomez wants Cohere to IPO for broader ownership and scrutiny2 min
“for a lot of these applications, you don't need to create a product. You don't need to create a whole new piece of software to solve it.”
Aidan Gomezat 6:02 · Upstarts
6:02

Takeaways

  1. North's chat builder lets nontechnical staff create automations.
  2. Workflows connect tools and authentication in a sequence of steps.
  3. A task may need no new app or codebase.

About this segment

Aidan Gomez says North lets nontechnical staff make chat-based automations using approved tools and authentication. That can solve a workflow without building a new software product.

Aidan Gomez

Aidan Gomez is co-founder and CEO of Cohere.

Co-founded Cohere, the sovereign AI company, and co-authored the Transformer paper, Attention Is All You Need.

  • Alex Konrad, Host · Founder & editor, Upstarts Media

    Ran Forbes' Midas List for ten years and co-created its Cloud 100 list; founded Upstarts in 2025.

From “Cohere's Aidan Gomez: The Canadian Founder Taking AI Models To The World, Not Just Big Tech”, Apr 16, 2026. Watch the full episode

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 4:19

    Or what would be the best way to sort of visualize this? Yeah, I think it's infrastructure for these high security enterprises to adopt agents and integrate it into their secure systems. That's what we do. At Cohere, obviously, we're internal customers of our own product, and many of the best automations have been created by or, like, discovered by folks who don't code. And they just, you know, as part of their day-to-day work, they're like, oh, I could totally use North for this.

  2. 4:47

    And they build an automation and they share it with people. And so that's what we want to be able to enable is, like, people just discover killer applications of the system, and then it goes viral within an organization and spreads out to all these different teams. and North really enables that. We are in a moment where we're being told you can Vibecode anything and there are some really successful companies that are helping people come up with an app out of an idea.

  3. 5:13

    Is the difference here that we couldn't really run a Bolt or a Lovable or one of these tools internally? in a sort of sensitive or secure environment with all our data? So using North is just sort of much more viable, or what would be sort of the distinction there? Yeah, I think the vibe coding stuff is very helpful for technical folks who want to get 90% of the way there, or even 95% of the way there.

  4. 5:42

    It can carry you quite far, but there's still a last mile that you need to close, and oftentimes you do need to be technical to close that last mile. And for North, you don't need to be technical to do that work. You have a sort of like builder view and you can just chat to the model and there's no need for you to be a developer yourself to do the work. So I think that's one thing. The other thing is that for a lot of these applications, you don't need to create a product.

  5. 6:11

    You don't need to create a whole new piece of software to solve it. all you really need is it to have access to the right tools with the right authentication and then you need to be able to build a series of steps that you want it to accomplish and that's a much simpler problem and there's an easier way to solve that rather than for each one of these that I want to create I'm going to have to create an entirely new code base and program and ask an agent, coding agent to go build it for me so I think it's a more simple and elegant solution to the problem Very cool. There's an interesting question of are startups reflecting the personalities or sort of backgrounds, preferences of their founders, or is it vice versa? And I'm curious, is this the kind of business that you would have always imagined running or building?