Cohere Brings On Meta’s Former Research Head as AI Officer
Cohere, once considered a leading Canadian contender in the AI space, has struggled to keep pace with rivals such as OpenAI and Anthropic. Despite raising significant funding, its models have fallen behind the state of the art, and its business growth has been slower than competitors. In response, the company has appointed Joelle Pineau, Meta’s former VP of AI Research, as its first Chief AI Officer.
Pineau, a Canadian AI scientist and McGill professor, previously guided the early development of Meta’s open Llama models and oversaw the FAIR lab. At Cohere, she will shape AI strategy across research, product, and policy teams, while working to accelerate breakthroughs, strengthen the product pipeline, and attract top talent.
A Pivotal Moment for Cohere
The hire follows Cohere’s $500 million funding round, which valued the company at $6.8 billion. While this is a strong figure, it is modest compared with the multibillion-dollar resources of competitors like OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Anthropic. Unlike these firms, which focus on building frontier systems approaching human-level intelligence, Cohere emphasizes practical AI solutions for enterprises and government agencies, prioritizing privacy and security.
Cohere’s latest product, North, is an AI agent platform designed for private deployment on customer infrastructure. This approach appeals to industries such as banking and government, where sensitive data requires strict handling. Although open-source competitors offer lower-cost options, Cohere is betting that its enterprise-focused support and private deployments will give it an edge.
Challenges and Opportunities Ahead
Pineau will immediately face the challenge of replacing Sara Hooker, Cohere’s departing VP of AI Research, who played a central role in shaping the company’s program. Recruiting high-caliber researchers will be difficult as major players like Meta and OpenAI continue offering massive compensation packages to secure talent.
Nevertheless, Cohere sees the appointment as an opportunity to bring in strong researchers, expand its research direction, and align efforts more closely with its enterprise products. The company aims to explore how private AI agents interact, create new benchmarks for evaluating systems, and deliver solutions that enterprises can adopt quickly.
As larger rivals pursue long-term bets on artificial general intelligence, Cohere is positioning itself to carve out a space by building reliable, secure, and efficient AI systems for real-world applications. With Pineau’s leadership, the company hopes to balance research innovation with practical enterprise deployment, ensuring it remains a competitive player in the evolving AI landscape.
