How the Founder of Coactive AI Is Bridging the Gap Between Human and Machine

What if your most valuable data isn’t in text, but in images, video, and audio you can’t yet search? On this episode of MindMakers, host John Kim is joined by Cody Coleman, CEO and Co-Founder of Coactive AI, to explore how enterprises can finally make sense of their image, video, and audio content. 

Coactive AI was born ahead of the AI revolution in 2021, and their platform can instantly search, organize, and analyze unstructured visual content to help businesses make faster, better decisions. While most of the AI world today is still focused on text, Cody and the team have their eyes set on the future.

Cody shares how his journey from foster care to Stanford and Silicon Valley shaped his belief in accessible, impactful technology. He and John dive into the untapped potential of unstructured data, why multimodal AI demands new tools, and how companies like Comcast, Fandom, and Thomson Reuters are turning visual content into searchable, actionable intelligence.

If you're working with rich media, rethinking AI infrastructure, or searching for signals in a sea of content, this episode reveals what it really takes to operationalize visual-first AI.

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Guest Bio

Cody Coleman is the Co-Founder and CEO of Coactive AI. He is also a Co-Creator of DAWNBench and MLPerf, a founding member of MLCommons, and his work spans developing standards and benchmarks for high-performance deep learning to data-centric AI. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford and MEng and BS degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT.

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Guest Quote

“The pace of the field is only going to accelerate. We're only going to continue to see more improvements in foundation models and multimodal AI. That’s why we designed the system to be model agnostic, so people can ride that wave of progress instead of getting locked into any one approach. We want them to keep up, not fall behind.”

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Time Stamps  

00:00 Episode Start

01:30 Cody's unconventional path to Silicon Valley

06:25 Blurring of digital & physical worlds

08:55 Early exposure to machine learning and AI

13:10 The inspiration that led to Coactive AI

16:40 Who benefits most from multimodal tech

20:50 Balancing your product for a wide range of technical abilities

26:25 Coactive AI's value prop

28:40 The potential when you move beyond text

34:35 Innovating ahead of the curve

41:00 Connecting storytelling to AI

45:15 Ensuring your AI projects bring ROI

50:20 Cody's Human Prompt

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Links

• Connect with Cody Coleman on LinkedIn
• Check out Coactive AI
• Connect with John Kim on LinkedIn
• Check out Sendbird

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