What is Cohere?
Learn about Cohere AI, the enterprise-focused company providing language models and RAG solutions for business applications and internal AI tools.
Cohere provides large language models, embedding APIs, and retrieval-augmented generation tools designed specifically for enterprise deployment. Unlike consumer-facing AI companies, Cohere focuses on helping businesses integrate AI into their existing workflows, data systems, and products - often running on private infrastructure rather than public APIs.
Why it matters
Cohere represents how AI is actually being deployed in large organizations - not as public chatbots but as infrastructure powering internal tools, search systems, and automated workflows. For marketers, understanding enterprise AI deployment helps explain why AI-powered experiences vary so dramatically. A company using Cohere-powered internal search may surface and cite content differently than one using OpenAI. As more businesses deploy private AI systems, the diversity of underlying models matters. Your content might perform excellently in ChatGPT but poorly in enterprise systems using different embeddings. The AI ecosystem is fragmenting, and Cohere is a major fragment.
What people get wrong
- Cohere is just another ChatGPT competitor. Cohere doesn't compete in the consumer chatbot space. Their models and business model target enterprise deployments where data privacy, customization, and integration matter more than conversational polish.
- Enterprise AI companies have worse models than consumer ones. Cohere's embeddings often outperform OpenAI's on retrieval benchmarks. Enterprise focus doesn't mean lower quality - it means different optimization targets like consistency, latency, and deployment flexibility.
- You need to choose between Cohere and other AI providers. Many enterprises use Cohere embeddings for retrieval while using OpenAI or Anthropic for generation. The modular nature of AI systems means best-of-breed approaches are common.
Related terms
LLM: Cohere develops and deploys large language models optimized for enterprise use cases and private deployment.
RAG: Cohere's product suite is specifically designed for RAG implementations, with embedding, retrieval, and generation components.
Embeddings: Cohere's Embed models are among the highest-performing embedding solutions, particularly for multilingual retrieval tasks.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Cohere?
Cohere is an enterprise AI company that provides language models, embedding APIs, and RAG infrastructure for businesses. Founded in 2019 by former Google Brain researchers, Cohere focuses on helping organizations deploy AI internally with flexible deployment options including on-premises and private cloud.
How is Cohere different from OpenAI?
OpenAI focuses primarily on consumer products (ChatGPT) and developer APIs, while Cohere targets enterprise deployments. Cohere offers more deployment flexibility (on-premises, private cloud), enterprise pricing models, and specialized tools for building internal AI applications rather than public-facing chatbots.
What are Cohere embeddings used for?
Cohere embeddings convert text into numerical vectors that capture semantic meaning. Enterprises use them for semantic search, document retrieval, recommendation systems, and the retrieval component of RAG applications. Their multilingual support makes them popular for global organizations.
Is Cohere available to individual users?
Cohere offers a free trial tier for developers, but the company's focus is enterprise customers. Individual marketers or small businesses typically encounter Cohere indirectly through enterprise tools built on their infrastructure rather than using Cohere APIs directly.
Who founded Cohere?
Cohere was co-founded by Aidan Gomez, Ivan Zhang, and Nick Frosst. Gomez notably co-authored the 'Attention Is All You Need' paper at Google Brain that introduced the Transformer architecture underlying modern LLMs like GPT-4 and Claude.