# Joëlle Pineau

Chief AI Officer, Cohere. TIME100 AI 2026, Leaders. Before leading Meta's AI research lab, she sat in a helicopter cockpit recording her own voice to train a speech system, because no female pilots were available. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo%C3%ABlle_Pineau))

- Born: 1974, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo%C3%ABlle_Pineau), [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/joelle-pineau-371574141_were-announcing-coheres-first-office-in-activity-7513973822136504321-zLOf))
- Education: PhD, Robotics, Carnegie Mellon University, 2004; MSc, Carnegie Mellon University; BASc, Engineering, University of Waterloo ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo%C3%ABlle_Pineau))
- Career: Cohere (Chief AI Officer, 2025 to now); Meta (VP AI Research, global lead of FAIR, 2017–2025); McGill University (Professor, from 2004); Natural Resources Canada ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo%C3%ABlle_Pineau), [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/in/joelle-pineau-371574141), [cs.mcgill.ca](https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~jpineau/))
- TIME profile: https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/2026/joelle-pineau/
- Profile: https://www.autumn.ai/resources/most-influential-people-in-ai/joelle-pineau

- Played viola in the Ottawa Symphony Orchestra. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo%C3%ABlle_Pineau))
- As a Waterloo student she helped train a voice recognition system for helicopter pilots, sitting in the cockpit to record her own voice under simulated stress because no female pilots were available. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo%C3%ABlle_Pineau))
- Her first job was at Canada's natural resources ministry, building models for solar energy use in fish farming. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo%C3%ABlle_Pineau))
- Her Carnegie Mellon robotics PhD was supervised by Sebastian Thrun, who later led Google's self-driving car project. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo%C3%ABlle_Pineau))
- As reproducibility chair of NeurIPS 2019 she introduced the reproducibility checklist that paper authors now fill in. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo%C3%ABlle_Pineau))
- Warns that relying on another country's AI models means a critical part of your infrastructure could be "shut off without you having any control." ([time.com](https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/2026/joelle-pineau/))