AI startup Cohere recently unveiled Coral, an enterprise-focused generative AI assistant designed to boost productivity for strategic business teams. Coral aims to provide a natural language interface where employees can ask questions and receive helpful, relevant answers just as they would from a knowledgeable colleague.
The announcement comes on the heels of similar offerings from competitors like AI21 Labs and Microsoft as enterprises race to deploy generative AI. Just last week, AI21 Labs announced Contextual Answers, bringing generative AI to the enterprise with a ready-to-use question answering engine that taps into organizational knowledge. Microsoft also recently launched Bing Chat Enterprise, a version of its conversational AI tool tailored for business use.
With other players staking their claim in the space, Cohere is making a big bet that its AI assistant Coral can stand out from the pack. Powered by Cohere's Command model, Coral is trained in conversation, reasoning, and writing skills. It can then be customized for each client by connecting to company data sources and deployed privately to protect sensitive information.
Cohere claims Coral can cut the time spent searching for information dramatically, with the potential to improve brainstorming and drafting efficiency by up to 50%. The company sees demand for AI assistants across all business functions, from customer support to legal to engineering teams.
The company acknowledges enterprises have justifiable concerns around data privacy and trust in generative AI. Many companies have banned consumer chatbots due to external data management and potential confidentiality issues. Verifying the reliability of chatbot responses is also difficult when models can generate confident but inaccurate answers.
To address these challenges, Cohere designed Coral specifically for enterprise needs:
- Conversational interface optimized for business interactions
- Customizable knowledge base integrating company data sources
- Grounding mechanism citing data sources to verify responses
- Deployed on private infrastructure to protect sensitive data
Early partners like Oracle, Elastic, and LivePerson are enthusiastic about pairing their products with Coral to deliver customized enterprise AI.
While Coral may not be ready to fully autonomously write marketing copy just yet, Cohere believes their technology has reached the stage where it can provide significant value in augmenting enterprise productivity. If the company succeeds in addressing businesses' data and trust concerns, Coral may pioneer a new class of B2B generative AI.
Coral is currently in private beta with a select group of customers. Cohere is inviting customers interested in participating in the program to reach out to their team.