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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 prices

Marshall 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, because you’re dealing with more and more complex agentic use cases,” he said. Those workflows require “a lot of processing, thinking, tools interaction” to complete their objectives, he added.

Alao also drew a contrast between providers that bill customers according to token consumption and Cohere’s approach.

“If your whole way of charging customers is for token utilization, you want to maximize token utilization,” he said. “We do not sell our models and our platform that way.”

Instead, Alao said Cohere tries to help enterprises solve their hardest problems privately and securely while reducing unnecessary model usage. His prescription was straightforward: “Use the right model for the task at hand.”

Rather than sending every request to the largest available frontier model, enterprises should route work according to the intelligence required and the sensitivity or regulatory burden attached to the task.

Alao cited an unnamed Canadian bank that uses Cohere’s on-premises models for highly regulated workloads, while sending less sensitive tasks requiring greater intelligence through Cohere’s North platform to larger frontier models.

“So model routing can become super useful,” he said.

Smaller models for most enterprise work

Asked by an audience member how Cohere’s open-source North Mini Code , released last month, could compete against proprietary coding models, Alao acknowledged that larger frontier models may perform somewhat better on the hardest tasks.

But that advantage may not justify using them indiscriminately.

“For 80% of the use cases that they needed, this was a lot more effective, a lot cheaper,” Alao said of developers adopting the model.

Cohere’s North Mini Code runs on a single Nvidia H100 GPU and targets agentic software engineering, including terminal work, code review and tool use.

The company has also released Command A+ , a 218-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model with only 25 billion parameters active during each generation step.

Its compressed four-bit version reduces the hardware required for private deployment, while its Apache 2.0 license gives enterprises broad freedom to operate and modify it.

Search becomes part of the agent

Asked about Cohere’s longstanding work on embeddings and enterprise search, Alao said the field is moving beyond retrieving text and inserting it into a model’s context window.

“Today, the state of the art is around multimodal search,” he said. “It’s beyond just the text modality.”

Search across documents, images and other forms of information is becoming “an integral component of your agentic workflow,” Alao added, with the model deciding when and how to use retrieval like any other tool.

Asked what would persuade enterprises to move beyond bundled AI services from existing cloud providers, Alao returned to data control and portability.

“If you’re interested in sovereignty, you want to have more control on your data,” he said. Cohere’s governance layer, he added, lets customers route traffic to appropriate models, “breaking that vendor lock-in concern that a lot of our customers have.”

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The debate over third-party franchises in MTG has raged for years now, but the issue just came to a head with head designer Mark Rosewater suggesting that those who don't like Universes Beyond should either adapt or leave the game behind.

In response to a fan expressing concern over how Rosewater responded to previous complaints about Universes Beyond, the designer writes on tumblr that there are only three paths forward for fans of the best card games : they must either accept the change, find like-minded players who don't want to use crossover sets, or "walk away" from MTG altogether.

"None of those is inherently easy," Rosewater says after comparing some fans' dislike of Universes Beyond to his own struggle in adapting to the player-led Commander format. "I really do understand your pain." However, he warns that there's no going back to how things used to be; the genie's out of the bottle.

"This just isn’t the way the game or the world works. Once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it’s just not going back in," he suggests. "Whether you like or dislike Universe Beyond, it has fundamentally changed the nature of what the game is. It’s taking the game to a whole new level, in both scope and awareness, much like Commander forever changed how people saw and interacted with the game."

Universes beyond number

(Image credit: Wizards of the Coast) At the time of writing, there are 11 main Universes Beyond sets so far - Star Trek, The Hobbit, Marvel Super Heroes, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Spider-Man, Final Fantasy, Assassin's Creed, Fallout, Doctor Who, and Lord of the Rings. That number increases by a significant amount when you include Secret Lair drops and sets introduced before the Universes Beyond label (such as Warhammer 40K).

Fans on reddit are taking issue with that comparison to Commander, though. As pointed out by user Anubara in the thread's most upvoted comment, "there's a difference between 'I don't like commander, so I will continue playing 60 card formats and not interact with commander', and 'I don't like universes beyond, but it's legal in every format.'" Many seem to be in agreement; KARLWHEEZER says that "the issue is that it really is unavoidable at every level of magic aside from draft and cube," while others criticize how Commander is an opt-in format compared to Universes Beyond now being available across most major playstyles.

For what it's worth, I understand the frustration. While it looks like a cool set, it'll be jarring to see the likes of Captain Kirk in November's Star Trek ( which features ultra-rare cards signed by actors ) beating up dragons. Yes, we had the sci-fi Edge of Eternities last year, but that was designed from the ground up to be a part of the MTG multiverse – it shared a lot of design language with Magic mainstays. By contrast, Star Trek, TMNT, and the rest can feel sort of… thematically tacked on, as it were, despite having a lot of love put into them both mechanically and in terms of overall design. (I'll argue with anyone who says they're phoned in, because that's simply not true.)

(Image credit: Future/Rollin Bishop) Still, I also understand where Rosewater is coming from. There's no denying how popular Universes Beyond is, and as he says, you can't put the toothpaste back into the tube now; it's too much of a success for that. As such, I suppose we've got no choice but to find a way to live with a world where Universes Beyond make up 50% of annual MTG releases .

What do you think? Is Universes Beyond pushing you away from MTG, or are you all in on crossovers?

Want something to take your mind off all this? Try the best board games or, if you're planning a vacation, the best travel board games .

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Two major mysteries in science, the nature of dark matter and the possible existence of higher dimensions, could be linked, new research suggests. The team behind a new study proposes that dark matter may be so strange and ghost-like because it is in tune with a fifth dimension.

When scientists discuss "extra dimensions," they aren't talking about other universes in which another evil version of you exists (and with a beard). Instead, they refer to dimensions that could be "curled up" with reality alongside the standard four-dimensional spacetime , consisting of the three dimensions of space and one dimension of time.

While these extra dimensions remain highly speculative, they have become a hot topic, especially as string theory, the most popular extension to standard physics, relies upon the existence of at least 11 dimensions. Scientists are more sure that dark matter exists, but proving its existence still remains troubling because, despite its gravity literally holding galaxies together and outweighing ordinary matter by around five to one, it remains effectively invisible because it doesn't interact with light and it simply ghosts through ordinary matter.

"Understanding dark matter would represent a profound advance in humanity's knowledge of the cosmos and what it is made of," team member Yu-Dai Tsai of the University of Sheffield said in a statement .

"Our research gives physicists clear new targets in the search for dark matter, while connecting two of the biggest ideas in fundamental physics: the mystery of dark matter and the existence of hidden dimensions."

Dark photons play dark matter like a violin

Though the main idea is that dark matter may operate in the fifth dimension, this new research expands upon that concept with another theory. It suggests that dark matter exists with another inhabitant of the fifth dimension, a force-carrying particle called a "dark photon."

Standard photons are the constituent particles of electromagnetic radiation, or light; dark photons would be similar but for a hypothetical "dark force."

The team's new proposal would see the unique geometry of the fifth dimension causing the masses of dark matter particles to form an arrangement that gives rise to a "dark matter resonance." This is akin to the intense vibration of a musical instrument at certain notes.

"Dark matter resonance is already known to be a powerful idea, with the potential to change our understanding of how dark matter was produced in the early universe and how we search for it today," team member Yu-Dai Tsai of the University of Sheffield said in a statement. "But many previous resonant dark matter models have treated the resonance as an assumption. This work gives a possible deeper origin for it: the resonance may come directly from the geometry of hidden dimensions."

An illustration shows a cloud of dark matter slipping past a distant star (Image credit: Robert Lea (created with Canva)) Tsai explained that while dark matter resonance is a phenomenon that has been explored before, the research conducted by this team differs because it suggests dark matter resonance is not a coincidence. Instead, the possible deeper origin for the resonance sees it emerge directly from the geometry of hidden dimensions. This would allow dark matter to interact strongly shortly after the Big Bang while allowing it to settle into its ghost-like inert existence today.

"This resonance can make dark matter interactions much stronger at crucial epochs in cosmic history, such as in the early universe," Tsai added. "Crucially, the model allows for these strong interactions in the past while still explaining why dark matter appears so inert and hard to detect today."

Of course, it is very early days for the team's theory, but it excitingly offers a way toward solving two of the universe's greatest mysteries.

The team's research was published in the Physical Review D.