What is Coactive AI? An in-depth overview

Let's be honest, most companies are swimming in data. But the real headache isn't the tidy stuff in spreadsheets. It's the messy, unstructured content, the flood of images and videos from social media, product pages, and dusty internal drives. Most of that visual gold is just sitting there, completely untapped, because making sense of it is a slow, expensive, and often inaccurate slog.

That's the exact problem Coactive AI aims to solve. It's a platform designed to make all that visual stuff searchable and genuinely useful.

In this post, we'll give you the straight scoop on Coactive AI. We’ll dig into what it’s good at, who it's for, and, critically, where it might not be the right fit. By the end, you'll have a much clearer picture of whether it's the tool for you.

What is Coactive AI?

At its core, Coactive AI is a platform that uses artificial intelligence to understand visual data like images, videos, and even audio. You can think of it as a smart system that can "watch" a video or "look" at a photo and tell you what's happening, without a human having to manually tag anything.

The big issue it tackles is the bottleneck of manual data entry. For years, if you wanted to find a specific image in a huge media library, you had to cross your fingers and hope someone had tagged it with the right keywords like "person" or "car." Coactive AI does that work for you, creating detailed, contextual descriptions all on its own.

The company was founded by MIT alumni Cody Coleman and William Gaviria Rojas and has some serious backing from investors like Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer Venture Partners. It’s built for teams who are serious about data and want to finally put the 80-90% of their unused visual content to work.

Co-founder and CEO of Coactive AI, Cody Coleman, provides an overview of how the platform is used to analyze visual content.

Key features and use cases of Coactive AI

The real magic of Coactive AI is how it interprets visual content with an almost human-like level of understanding. This opens the door to some powerful uses, especially for companies whose business revolves around visual media.

Coactive AI tags your visual content for you (but way smarter)

Instead of just adding basic tags, Coactive AI generates rich, contextual metadata for your visual content automatically. It can break down videos frame by frame, understanding the details of each shot and scene.

For instance, a manual tag might just say "car." Coactive AI’s version would be something like, "a red convertible driving on a coastal highway on a sunny day." That level of detail makes your content library infinitely more searchable.

Find anything with natural language search in Coactive AI

This detailed tagging means your team can search through massive visual libraries just by typing in what they’re looking for, as if they were asking a person. You can search for abstract ideas like "a family celebrating a holiday" instead of being stuck with simple keywords like "people" and "cake."

A perfect real-world example is how Reuters uses Coactive AI. Their journalists can pull up relevant photos and videos from a database of millions of files in seconds. This helps them tell better stories without wasting hours digging through archives.

Automate your content moderation with Coactive AI

For any platform that relies on user-generated content, keeping the community safe is a constant battle. Coactive AI can help by automatically finding, flagging, and removing harmful or inappropriate content before it becomes a problem.

Take Fandom, one of the biggest fan community platforms out there. They use Coactive to automate 90% of their content uploads. This simple change cut their manual review time by 74% and halved their moderation costs, letting their team focus on more meaningful work.

The limitations of Coactive AI

Coactive AI is fantastic at what it does, but that laser focus on visuals is also its biggest drawback for a lot of teams. If you're running a customer support or internal help desk, its specialty can feel more like a limitation.

It's all about visual data, not text

Coactive AI is built from the ground up for visual media. That's a huge plus if you're a media company, but it doesn't do much for businesses whose knowledge is mostly text-based.

Most support and IT teams run on text. They rely on help articles, past support tickets, and internal wikis stored in tools like Confluence or Google Docs. For any team looking to automate answers based on that kind of information, a platform like eesel AI is a much more natural choice. It’s designed specifically to connect those text-based sources and deliver accurate answers.

It analyzes things but doesn't take action

There’s a world of difference between analyzing data and actually doing something with it. Coactive AI is great at the first part, it can find the right video clip or flag a sketchy image. But it can’t resolve a customer ticket on its own, triage an IT request, or update a customer’s order.

To really automate your workflows, you need a tool that can trigger actions. For instance, eesel AI can be set up with custom actions to do more than just find information. It can escalate tickets in Zendesk, tag conversations in Intercom, or look up order details straight from Shopify.

It has that big, enterprise software feel

Given Coactive AI’s target audience (large media companies) and its high-profile investors, it’s safe to assume they use a traditional enterprise sales process. This usually means a long cycle of discovery calls, custom demos, and a drawn-out implementation. That's not ideal for teams that need to move fast.

The new wave of AI tools is all about self-service. With eesel AI, you can connect your apps, set up an AI agent, and even test it on your past tickets in a matter of minutes, no sales call required. The difference in approach is huge: one gets you stuck in meetings, the other gets you results.

Coactive AI pricing

Trying to find a price for Coactive AI? Good luck. The company doesn't list its pricing publicly, and as of now, the pricing link on their site is broken.

This isn't unusual for big enterprise software, and it generally points to a few things. First, the price is custom, meaning you have to get on the phone with sales. Second, it’s probably negotiable based on how much data you have and what you want to do. And third, you can't really budget for it until you've gone through that whole sales process.

For teams that just want to get moving, that opaque pricing is a real roadblock. It's the opposite of platforms like eesel AI, which lays out its pricing plans for everyone to see. You know exactly what you're getting into, so you can start small, show it works, and grow from there without any financial surprises.

The verdict: Is Coactive AI the right tool for your team?

Coactive AI is a seriously powerful tool, but it's definitely not a one-size-fits-all solution.

If your organization is sitting on massive archives of visual content, we're talking media giants, movie studios, or huge online retailers, it could be a fantastic investment. It helps you get value from data that was previously just taking up space and automates some incredibly tedious manual work.

But for most other businesses, its strengths are also its weaknesses. It’s not built for text-based support, it can’t take direct action to resolve issues, and its sales process feels like it's from another era.

So, here's the bottom line: if your biggest problem is making sense of petabytes of images and videos, Coactive AI is worth a look. But if you’re trying to automate customer support, improve your internal help desk, or just make your company knowledge easier to access, you should be looking at a different kind of AI tool.

A better alternative for support and knowledge automation: eesel AI

For all the things Coactive AI doesn't do, there's eesel AI. It was built for one clear purpose: to help teams automate support and unlock the knowledge they already have in their day-to-day apps.

Here’s how eesel AI picks up where Coactive AI leaves off:

• Made for the text-based apps you actually use: It connects instantly to help desks like Zendesk, wikis like Confluence and Notion, and chat tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams.

• Actually automates your work: It doesn't just find answers. eesel AI can take care of business, tagging, triaging, and closing tickets, to cut down on your team's manual grunt work.

• Simple and self-serve: You can go from signing up to having a working AI agent in minutes, not months. Test it on your old tickets and roll it out when you’re ready, all by yourself.

• Clear, predictable pricing: With public plans and no weird per-resolution fees, you can easily manage your budget and prove its value.

Ready to automate your support with an AI that plugs into the tools you already have? Get started with eesel AI for free or book a demo to see how it all works.