Coactive’s AI Platform Helps Machines Understand Visual Content, Unlocking New Business Insights

In today’s data-driven world, businesses are increasingly relying on information to make critical decisions. However, a significant blind spot exists: the inability to effectively analyze visual data. Coactive, founded by Cody Coleman ’13, MEng ’15, and William Gaviria Rojas ’13, is addressing this challenge with an innovative artificial intelligence-powered platform.

Coactive’s platform is designed to understand data such as images, audio, and video, enabling businesses to unlock valuable insights from unstructured visual content. By instantly searching, organizing, and analyzing this content, the platform empowers businesses to make faster and more informed decisions.

“In the first big data revolution, businesses got better at getting value out of their structured data,” says Coleman, referring to data from tables and spreadsheets. “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 already collaborating with major media and retail companies to help them comprehend their visual content without the need for manual sorting and tagging. This enables them to deliver relevant content to users more efficiently, remove inappropriate content, and gain insights into how specific content influences user behavior.

The founders view Coactive as an example of how AI can augment human capabilities, allowing for more efficient work and the ability to tackle novel challenges. Coleman states, “The word coactive means to work together concurrently, and that’s our grand vision: helping humans and machines work together. We believe that vision is more important now than ever because AI can either pull us apart or bring us together. We want Coactive to be an agent that pulls us together and gives human beings a new set of superpowers.”

Coleman and Gaviria Rojas met before their first year at MIT through the MIT Interphase Edge program. They both majored in electrical engineering and computer science and collaborated on bringing MIT OpenCourseWare content to Mexican universities.

After MIT, Coleman pursued his PhD at Stanford University, focusing on reducing barriers to AI adoption. This led to collaborations with companies like Pinterest and Meta on AI and machine-learning applications. Gaviria Rojas worked as a data scientist at eBay, further solidifying their understanding of the data and AI landscape.

The platform developed by Coactive is model agnostic, enabling the company to adapt to evolving AI technologies. It includes prebuilt applications that allow business customers to search their content, generate metadata, and perform analytics to extract insights.

“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, a global news organization, utilizes Coactive’s technology to enhance its image database. Previously, reporters had to manually tag photos, which was time-consuming and often resulted in incomplete tagging. With Coactive, journalists can now use AI search to find relevant content based on the system’s understanding of the image details.

Fandom, a large platform for TV shows, video games, and movies, leverages Coactive to understand visual data within its online communities and remove inappropriate content. This has significantly reduced the time required to review new content, from 24-48 hours to approximately 500 milliseconds.

Coactive’s founders believe their platform represents a new paradigm in human-computer interaction. “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,” Coleman says. “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.”