Cohere's Compass Cloud claims a 16.3-point retrieval lift

Cohere opened Compass Cloud private beta and reports a 16.3-point nDCG@10 lift, from 64.8 to 81.1, over Azure Search on its internal High Finance benchmark. The comparison is directional rather than independent: Cohere says Azure documents were parsed with GPT-4.1 Mini while Compass embedded the input PDFs directly, and the test set is Cohere-annotated. Teams weighing managed retrieval should keep a workload-specific acceptance test beside the vendor score, as MLPerf’s RAG benchmark shows why eligibility is not application accuracy.