Cohere VP says enterprise AI sovereignty requires control of the full agent stack
Hundreds of enterprise leaders and technical experts packed the main ballroom of the luxurious Hotel Nia in Menlo Park this week for VB Transform 2026, the year's preeminent conference on using generative AI agents to drive business outcomes.
Rachad Alao, vice president of product engineering at the rising Canadian enterprise AI startup Cohere, joined VentureBeat CEO and editor-in-chief Matt Marshall for a fireside chat about building agentic systems without surrendering sensitive data, infrastructure control, or the ability to change vendors.
Alao, who previously led responsible AI and trust and safety engineering teams at Google and Meta, argued that AI sovereignty means more than downloading an open model or running an application behind a corporate firewall.
Asked how Cohere defines sovereignty, Alao pointed to organizations operating mission-critical systems, including banks, hospitals and governments.
“It is important to have very tight control on where the data resides, have tight control on...
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