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Upstarts · 3 min · Apr 16, 2026

Cohere keeps humans involved in sensitive AI decisions

Aidan Gomez · Co-founder & CEO, Cohere

Aidan Gomez says Cohere discusses readiness and safeguards with customers, then builds human review into actions it won't automate.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 30:18Cohere chose independence over the easier growth path5 min
  2. 21:48Gomez sees AI-driven growth as a defense against scarcity4 min
  3. 25:13AI sovereignty depends on a diverse supply of providers4 min
  4. 36:31Cohere keeps humans involved in sensitive AI decisions3 min
  5. 4:13North lets staff build automations without creating a new product3 min
  6. 18:49Cohere began with a bet on training a model on the whole web2 min
  7. 8:17Rural internet scarcity led Gomez into hands-on AI research5 min
  8. 39:33Gomez wants Cohere to IPO for broader ownership and scrutiny2 min
“Human oversight is a key component of it. The ability to say there's a certain category of activities or actions that we're never going to fully automate.”
Aidan Gomezat 37:53 · Upstarts
37:53

Takeaways

  1. Cohere engages customers on readiness and safeguards before deployment.
  2. It keeps humans in sensitive actions that should not be fully automated.
  3. It chooses which countries and governments to serve.

About this segment

Aidan Gomez says Cohere discusses readiness and safeguards with customers, then builds human review into actions it won't automate. The company also chooses which governments it works with.

Aidan Gomez

Aidan Gomez is co-founder and CEO of Cohere.

Co-founded Cohere, the sovereign AI company, and co-authored the Transformer paper, Attention Is All You Need.

  • Alex Konrad, Host · Founder & editor, Upstarts Media

    Ran Forbes' Midas List for ten years and co-created its Cloud 100 list; founded Upstarts in 2025.

From “Cohere's Aidan Gomez: The Canadian Founder Taking AI Models To The World, Not Just Big Tech”, Apr 16, 2026. Watch the full episode

Answers “Is AI dangerous?” See all 100 answers

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 36:37

    something I really, I really admire. How do you balance your own sort of, maybe idealism isn't the right word, but your values here and the vision of the world that seems to matter a lot to you with the sort of idea of letting these customers or these, you know, the sovereignty do things that maybe you wouldn't agree with. You know, we're in a moment where one of the big AI labs has had a very public spat with the government about use of its tools. You are used by a bunch of governments? Is this something that you have to grapple with or that you feel really comfortable with? Kind of what becomes the true north for Cohere there? Yeah, it's super important. And this technology, it's going to be integrated everywhere. Every single industry, public sector, private sector, defense, civil, we just have to accept that it will be. The way we approach

  2. 37:29

    it at Cohere is we're fortunate in that because we work directly with our customers, we have a lot of opportunity to educate and engage with them so we're able to be a partner to them in thinking about where is it right to deploy this where's the technology ready to be deployed and what sort of safeguards need to be in place. And we try to build those into the model. We try to build those into North, the product around the model. Human oversight is a key component of it. The ability to say there's a certain category of activities or actions that we're never going to fully automate. We will always have a human in the loop for.

  3. 38:11

    We ensure that within North that can be implemented in an extremely accurate and reliable way so that you know a human is involved in making that decision. And there are many, many ethical questions about how AI gets deployed into some of these more sensitive sectors. Of course, defense like you're referencing, but also healthcare and financial decisions. And all of these have meaningful consequences on people's lives. So we try to be very conscious of that and provide the tools to make effective decisions. And then we also choose who we work with, right?

  4. 38:47

    We can actually, from our position, make a decision of who we do business with and, in particular, which countries we engage with. And with democracies, the fantastic thing is that it's a better way of governance. It tends to have much better checks and balances when someone does step out of line or when an agency does break the law. There's a reckoning with that. And then fixes are implemented. And the system self-repairs through those issues.

  5. 39:17

    And so we trust the democratic process to produce results that protect people and ultimately end up in the best possible policy environment to support the right sort of adoption of this technology. But of course, we do choose who we work with and what governments we engage with versus which ones we don't.