Coactive AI: Helping Machines Understand Visual Content to Revolutionize Industries

In today’s data-driven world, businesses recognize the immense value of informed decision-making. However, a significant blind spot persists: understanding visual data. Coactive, founded by Cody Coleman ’13, MEng ’15, and William Gaviria Rojas ’13, aims to bridge this gap with its artificial intelligence-powered platform.

Coactive’s platform is designed to analyze unstructured visual content, including images, audio, and video, providing businesses with actionable insights. By enabling the instant search, organization, and analysis of this content, Coactive empowers businesses to make informed decisions faster and more effectively.

“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.”

Coactive is collaborating with major media and retail companies, enabling them to comprehend visual content without manual sorting and tagging. This allows for faster content delivery, removal of explicit material, and insights into user behavior.

Coleman and Gaviria Rojas met during the MIT Interphase Edge program. They then pursued electrical engineering and computer science, collaborating on bringing MIT OpenCourseWare content to Mexican universities. Coleman further explored AI’s potential at MIT, studying human learning on MITx using machine learning.

After MIT, Coleman pursued a PhD at Stanford, focusing on lowering barriers to AI adoption. This led to collaborations with companies like Pinterest and Meta. Meanwhile, Gaviria Rojas joined eBay as a data scientist. A chance encounter led them to realize the potential of AI in unlocking multimodal data.

Coactive’s “AI operating system” is model-agnostic, allowing for continuous improvement. It features prebuilt applications for content searching, metadata generation, and analytics. The impact is far-reaching, as Coleman explains, “Before AI, computers would see the world through bytes, whereas humans would see the world through vision. 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 leverages Coactive to enhance its image database, improving search results for journalists. Fandom, a platform with over 300 million monthly users, uses Coactive to moderate content, reducing review times from 24-48 hours to approximately 500 milliseconds.

Coactive envisions a future where humans and machines collaborate seamlessly. Coleman emphasizes, “Throughout the history of human-computer interaction, we’ve had to bend over a keyboard and mouse to input information in a way that machines could understand. Now, for the first time, we can just speak naturally, we can share images and video with AI, and it can understand that content. That’s a fundamental change in the way we think about human-computer interactions. The core vision of Coactive is because of that change, we need a new operating system and a new way of working with content and AI.”