Coactive AI: Helping Machines Understand Visual Content for Enhanced Business Insights

In today’s data-driven world, businesses are increasingly recognizing the value of leveraging data for informed decision-making. However, many companies face a significant challenge: understanding and extracting insights from their visual data. Coactive AI, founded by Cody Coleman and William Gaviria Rojas, aims to bridge this gap with its innovative artificial intelligence-powered platform.

Coactive’s platform is designed to analyze unstructured visual content, including images, audio, and video, enabling businesses to search, organize, and analyze this data efficiently. This capability empowers organizations to make quicker and more effective decisions, unlocking valuable insights that were previously inaccessible.

“In the first big data revolution, businesses got better at getting value out of their structured data,” says Coleman. “But now, approximately 80 to 90 percent of the data in the world is unstructured. In the next chapter of big data, companies will have to process data like images, video, and audio at scale, and AI is a key piece of unlocking that capability.”

Currently, Coactive is collaborating with major media and retail companies, assisting them in understanding their visual content without the need for manual sorting and tagging. This enables them to deliver relevant content to users faster, identify and remove inappropriate content, and gain insights into how specific content influences user behavior.

The founders of Coactive envision their platform as an example of how AI can enhance human capabilities and facilitate more efficient problem-solving. Their goal is to create a harmonious partnership between humans and machines, enabling them to work together seamlessly.

Coleman and Gaviria Rojas met through the MIT Interphase Edge program and both studied electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. Their shared experiences, including working on MIT OpenCourseWare, sparked their entrepreneurial spirit.

Coleman’s exploration of AI began during his graduate research at MIT’s Office of Digital Learning, where he used machine learning to study human learning patterns on MITx. This experience highlighted the potential of AI to personalize learning experiences and analyze video content.

After MIT, Coleman pursued his PhD at Stanford University, focusing on lowering barriers to using AI. His research involved collaborations with companies like Pinterest and Meta, providing him with insights into the future applications of AI.

Gaviria Rojas joined eBay as a data scientist in 2020. A conversation during a car ride sparked the idea for Coactive.

“On the car ride, we realized we both saw an explosion happening around data and AI,” Gaviria Rojas says. “At MIT, we got a front row seat to the big data revolution, and we saw people inventing technologies to unlock value from that data at scale. Cody and I realized we had another powder keg about to explode with enterprises collecting tremendous amount of data, but this time it was multimodal data like images, video, audio, and text. There was a missing technology to unlock it at scale. That was AI.”

Coactive’s AI operating system is designed to be model agnostic. The platform includes prebuilt applications for content searching, metadata generation, and analytics, providing businesses with valuable tools for extracting insights from their visual data.

“Before AI, computers would see the world through bytes, whereas humans would see the world through vision,” Coleman says. “Now with AI, machines can finally see the world like we do, and that’s going to cause the digital and physical worlds to blur.”

Reuters utilizes Coactive to enhance its image database. By implementing AI search, journalists can now access relevant content more efficiently, leading to better and more accurate storytelling.

Fandom, a platform for TV shows, video games, and movies, leverages Coactive to moderate visual data and remove inappropriate content, ensuring a safer online community.

Coactive aims to change human-computer interactions. The founders see a future where AI can understand natural language, images, and video, creating a more intuitive and efficient way for humans and machines to collaborate.