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 the AI,” he said, adding that AI operations should take place in jurisdictions an organization understands or directly controls.That extends from GPUs and private-cloud infrastructure through governance systems that route requests among models, as well as the connectors, search tools and agent frameworks acting on enterprise data.“You want to have control on the entire stack,” Alao said.Agent workloads could outrun falling token pricesMarshall challenged one of the central economic arguments for smaller, locally deployed models: Inference prices continue to fall rapidly, potentially weakening the case for optimizing every token.Alao countered that total consumption is climbing even faster as enterprises move from relatively simple chatbots to agents that reason through problems, call tools, search internal systems and take multiple steps before returning an answer.“Your token utilization is going exponentially up, …
