How would you improve Compass search inside Cohere North for frontline staff at large enterprises?

Introduction

Compass is Cohere's enterprise search capability. It indexes documents, spreadsheets, slides and images from systems such as SharePoint, Google Drive, Confluence and email, and powers the search and grounded answers inside North, Cohere's agentic workspace. When an employee asks North "What is our travel reimbursement limit for client dinners in Quebec?", Compass decides which documents the model sees. If retrieval is wrong, the answer is wrong, however good the language model is.

The prompt asks how we would improve Compass inside North for employees at a large enterprise who search for policies, procedures and internal knowledge. I'll clarify the context, segment users, map the search journey, identify pain points, generate and prioritise solutions, and define how we would measure success.

Step 1

Clarifying Questions (5 mins)

• Looking at usage, what share of North conversations rely on Compass retrieval, and how often do users rate those answers as unhelpful?

Why it matters: Shows whether search quality is the main driver of dissatisfaction. Expected answer: About 70% of conversations use retrieval; roughly one in five retrieval answers gets a thumbs-down or a rephrased follow-up. Impact on approach: We'll focus on the retrieval-heavy journeys where dissatisfaction is concentrated.

• Which customers and content sources are we prioritising?

Why it matters: A bank with millions of SharePoint files has different problems from a 2,000-person software firm. Expected answer: Large regulated enterprises (5,000+ employees) in banking, insurance and telecom with SharePoint and Confluence as the main sources. Impact on approach: We'll design for scale, permissions and document versioning.

• Are there constraints on what we can change?

Why it matters: Compass may run in the customer's private cloud, so we can't always see raw queries. Expected answer: Yes. Telemetry is aggregated and customer admins control logging. Impact on approach: Solutions must work with privacy-preserving analytics and give admins tools to see problems themselves.

• What is the company goal for North this year?

Why it matters: Aligns the improvement with business priorities. Expected answer: Grow weekly active users within existing accounts to drive seat expansion at renewal. Impact on approach: We'll prioritise improvements that make daily search habits stick.