Cohere taps Meta veteran Joelle Pineau as chief AI officer to revive research and product momentum

Cohere has made a major strategic move by hiring Joelle Pineau, the former head of AI research at Meta, as its new Chief AI Officer. Pineau, a renowned Canadian AI scientist and professor at McGill University, previously led Meta’s fundamental AI research (FAIR) lab and played a key role in the development of the open-source Llama models alongside Yann LeCun. She left Meta in May after nearly eight years with the company. Her appointment marks a pivotal moment for Cohere, which has struggled to keep pace with industry leaders like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic despite raising about $1 billion from investors who once saw it as a top contender in the race for frontier AI. While Cohere’s models have lagged behind the state-of-the-art, the company has carved out a niche by focusing on enterprise and government applications that prioritize privacy, security, and on-premise deployment. In her new role, Pineau will oversee AI strategy across research, product, and policy, aiming to revitalize Cohere’s innovation pipeline. She is particularly drawn to the company’s mission of building practical AI solutions for real-world problems, a contrast to the broader, long-term focus on artificial general intelligence (AGI) seen at Meta and others. Pineau expressed skepticism about the near-term feasibility of AGI, citing the recent launch of OpenAI’s GPT-5 as underwhelming and suggesting that the timeline for achieving human-level AI may be longer than expected. Instead, she sees immense potential in deploying AI to boost productivity across industries through secure, private systems. Cohere’s latest offering, the North AI agent platform, allows organizations to run AI models privately on their own infrastructure—ideal for sensitive sectors like banking and federal agencies. This positions Cohere against open-source alternatives like Meta’s Llama and DeepSeek, but the company bets on superior support and integration to win enterprise trust. Pineau also plans to focus on advancing AI agent research, especially in private environments, and developing benchmarks to evaluate their performance. She will also tackle the challenge of how AI agents interact in complex, real-world settings. Her arrival comes as Cohere seeks to raise up to $500 million at a $6.3 billion valuation—ambitious given the financial firepower of its competitors. The company recently lost its VP of AI Research, Sara Hooker, who is departing after years of building its research program. Pineau acknowledges the difficulty of recruiting top-tier talent amid a fierce talent war, with Meta and OpenAI offering multi-million-dollar compensation packages. Still, she believes success lies not just in hiring stars, but in fostering strong team dynamics. “Hiring a bunch of superstars doesn’t necessarily make a superstar team,” she said. “It’s really about how the people work together.” Despite limited resources compared to giants like Meta, Pineau sees agility as an advantage. She aims to make focused, high-impact research bets that translate quickly into market-ready products—critical for Cohere’s survival in a hyper-competitive landscape.