Cohere said on 25 September that Compass, its enterprise retrieval platform, is entering private beta as a managed cloud service. Compass is the machinery that sits between a company’s documents and a model: parsing, embedding, indexing, retrieval and reranking, bundled as one service rather than assembled from parts.
Until now it has been available inside Cohere’s North workspace and as a self-hosted deployment for customers in regulated industries whose data cannot leave their own environment. Those self-hosted deployments stay. The new option removes the operational work of running it, and is reachable through an API, a Model Context Protocol server or a Python SDK, with connectors for stores including SharePoint and OneDrive.
Two caveats. This is a private beta with a limited number of enterprise partners, and no pricing, general availability date or region list has been, so it is an intention more than a product.
On performance, Cohere reports a 14 to 16 point improvement over Azure Search, from 64.8 to 81.1 on retrieval accuracy measured by nDCG@10. To its credit it says plainly what the test is: High Finance, an internal, Cohere-annotated set of investment-banking retrieval questions. A vendor’s own benchmark against a named competitor.