Cohere Empowers Businesses to Build AI Utilizing Slack and Google Drive Data

Today, Cohere, an OpenAI competitor specializing in large language models (LLMs) for enterprises, unveiled its new “build-your-own connectors” feature. This innovation allows businesses to securely integrate their data from third-party applications like Slack, Google Drive, ServiceNow, and WordPress into Cohere’s Command LLM.

A company representative highlighted that, “as far as we know,” this offering is a pioneering solution in the industry. It follows Cohere's recent achievement of being “the first and only AI company that offers fine-tuning across all four cloud providers.” According to a Cohere blog post, this open beta release empowers businesses to create AI assistants on Cohere’s enhanced AI platform, utilizing information from numerous daily tools for contextually relevant and accurate responses.

“Data is gold for LLMs,” said Roy Eldar, a senior product manager at Cohere. “Enabling enterprise models to securely access company data across multiple third-party applications is a game changer for what AI can deliver to businesses.”

Cohere's blog noted that these connectors represent a key step in its mission to meet companies where their data resides, regardless of the cloud or application. This feature allows businesses to securely integrate their data into models, utilizing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to enhance response accuracy and minimize hallucinations.

The upgraded Command framework enables enterprises to connect data from third-party stores that have an accompanying search API integrated into RAG. This significant enhancement allows Cohere to provide citations alongside AI-generated responses, enabling users to click on source links for verification or additional context.

Cohere described the integration of RAG with third-party data stores via connectors as a “dramatic improvement” in the effectiveness of conversational AI solutions for businesses.

To assist developers, Cohere is releasing approximately 100 “quick start connectors” on GitHub for popular data storage applications, including GitHub, Asana, Slack, Dropbox, Google Drive, and Pinecone. The company also offers comprehensive support for additional third-party data stores.

This announcement caps off a remarkable year for the Toronto-based Cohere. Earlier this year, the company acknowledged it was largely unnoticed before successfully raising $270 million in funding in June and opening a second headquarters in San Francisco in September.

Following the recent upheaval at OpenAI—where CEO Sam Altman was briefly ousted before being reinstated—Cohere reported an uptick in inquiries from businesses. Cohere co-founder and CEO Aidan Gomez even shared a link to the company's careers page, highlighting openings for “Machine Learning Members of Technical Staff.”