An Unexpected Journey - Jacqueline Comer ('01 BA)

For Jacqueline Comer (’01 BA), the road to an English degree was paved with blue and orange. Moving from London, England to Edmonton when she was five, she came of age during the Oilers golden era of the 1980s and early '90s; a dominant stretch where Stanley Cup victories felt like an inevitability. A deeply formative experience, it not only ignited her life-long love for the team, but also her dream of becoming a professional sports writer and, more importantly, getting paid to attend games without having to use her student loan money.

That level of strategic goal-setting, guided at the time by youthful logic, would serve Comer well throughout her life. Not only did she secure a sports column with See Magazine, which led to assignments for local media including the Edmonton Journal, her experiences as an English major immersed her in the nuances of language — a passion that would ultimately take her in an entirely different direction, and, decades later, lead her back to her beloved sports team.

“I’ve always been a word nerd,” says Comer, sharing her love for etymology and ‘a good thesaurus’ from her home in New Zealand, where she had emigrated ‘to marry a Kiwi’. “I am obsessed with the power of words, so doing an English degree just made sense for me.”

It is the power of words, specifically the power of words to build and destroy, that brought her to her current role as founder and chief product officer with Areto Labs, a start-up company that uses machine-learning AI software to defend people and brands (including the Edmonton Oilers) against large-scale digital threats. Co-founded by fellow alumna Lana Cuthbertson (’10 BA) and Kasey Machin, Areto’s global clients include sports organizations, publishers, governments and private citizens.

Essentially, Comer explains, the software neutralizes hate, misinformation and automated attacks by deleting bot traffic (things like porn bots, crypto scams, illegal streams or pirated content) and hiding harmful 'human’ comments in real time. The automated bots and anonymous accounts can still see the comments, but they are essentially ‘screaming into the void’, she says, likening it to a letter that never makes it to the targeted person’s desk.

“When we think about responsible AI, censorship and access, it’s not just freedom of expression, it’s freedom from harm,” she says. “We want our users to have control over their communities to better manage their online spaces. Deleting a comment only causes unintended consequences.”

From the sports desk to the frontiers of AI

Comer acknowledges that her journey from storyteller to a tech entrepreneur may look like a detour, but she views it as a natural evolution of a career-long focus on work that centres on the profound influence of language to shape the world.

“I care a lot about the nuance of language and making sure that people aren't being harmed en masse by words. I'm still reading deeply into things, thinking about how a set of words can have an impact on somebody, somewhere. It comes down to empathy and the humanity of the work— it’s all completely related.”

Areto Labs grew out of several earlier iterations, starting with ParityYeg, a 2017 initiative co-founded by Cuthbertson and Machin that was aimed at supporting women in local politics on digital platforms. It was further developed into ParityBot, an AI-powered system designed to counter online harassment of female political candidates by responding to abusive tweets with positive ones. The initiative became an incorporated company in 2020; later that year, Comer came on board as the third co-founder.

Comer’s technical expertise draws on her previous experiences as a creative marketing executive and, more directly, the Master of Technological Futures degree she completed concurrently during the establishment of Areto Labs. It was while analyzing data from ParityBot for her master’s project — which she had deployed in New Zealand with the founders of Areto — that she identified systemic blind spots in mainstream AI models. The AI caught overt racist slurs or violent and sexist language but consistently ‘failed to fire on’ certain gender-based microaggressions.

Comer cites the example of Catherine McKenna, a highly accomplished Minister of the Environment who had been nicknamed ‘Climate Barbie’. Coined by the conservative Rebel Media, it was an insidious, targeted assault intended to devalue her leadership through gender-based, online mockery.

“If we're missing that, what else are we missing,” she asked. For Comer, it was a wake up call.

“What I found was that the most damaging content rarely looks like a slur,” she says. “It hides in nicknames, in tone, in the language of dismissal. Most moderation systems never see it. We are a women-founded company and we really care about catching racial and gendered biases that developers — who may not have directly experienced these harms — miss, and therefore omit from the models they train.”

Armed with these insights, she partnered with a graduate student in computer science from back home in Alberta and together, they built a more sophisticated model designed to remove bias at every level of the product development lifecycle, catching what previous iterations had missed. Calling it the Microaggressions Detection Model (MAMO), the breakthrough system fully realized Areto's mission — fostering a safer, fairer and more inclusive online experience for communities worldwide.

The first model was “a bit EMO” she says, and simply flagged everything as negative. With further development, and Comer on board full-time with Areto, MAMO was fully integrated into the company’s operations.

Tracking digital harm

Women, marginalized communities, public figures, athletes, journalists — the people whose visibility matters most to healthy democratic and civic life — face the highest volume of identity-based harm, explains Comer. The damage, she adds, extends far beyond the targeted individuals and brands; it also takes a heavy toll on the frontline moderators — often junior employees — tasked with wading through the toxic stream of abuse. Left unchecked, unfiltered digital abuse effectively cleanses public spaces of the very voices and talent they were meant to amplify.

Comer’s ongoing efforts to create safe AI safety led her to build the Areto Global Hate Speech Index to benchmark digital harms in sport that tracks how people are treated across major public conversations. She developed the index to gain a better understanding of the underlying trends, knowing that simply counting the number of incidents wasn’t a true measure of a deteriorating digital climate.

The data shows that homophobic and transphobic comments fluctuate far more dramatically than racist comments, Comer explains. Spikes often coincide with moments of heightened visibility — such as the Transgender Day of Visibility — when organizations post supportive content and the bots trained to find positive trans language actively target those posts.

These dynamics also appear in sports. Men’s sport typically shows a gentle, consistent rise in hate speech, whereas women’s sport — such as during the WNBA playoffs — experiences sharp surges. “What we found is that when you look at elements like transphobia and sexism, there tends to be the highest incidents across sport, but it’s not that people are calling out trans athletes or women athletes,” says Comer. “It’s that when you want to slag anyone, sexist or transphobic language has become the language of the internet.”

The Index is now used by media, researchers and leaders to better understand online speech and its real-world impacts.

Comer’s global leadership in AI safety was recognized last month with the inaugural 2026 She Shapes AI Award for AI + Safety. The award honours women developing and applying AI in ways that are responsible, impactful and forward-looking.

“I couldn’t wait to tell my mom,” she laughs. “It’s really cool that the work our team has built together has been recognized globally. We hear a lot of scary stuff about AI, but because Areto works in a space around online harms, we talk to a lot of really amazing people who care about their communities — passionate, smart people who are working on niche, societal problems and using AI to fix them. Just because you don't see them doesn't mean it's not happening.”

Full circle

Reflecting on a journey that began long before the proliferation of natural language processing, Comer says she could never have imagined where her education would take her. Though the technology has evolved from sports reporting to advanced AI, her core mission remains unchanged: a deep-seated commitment to the power of words to either build or destroy, and a lifelong dedication to the stories those words tell.

“The core of what I’m doing is still exactly the same,” she says. “It was such a gift — and I say this now looking through rose-coloured glasses — to spend four years reading and learning and listening; talking to people about the power of language, the power of society, where we come from and where we're going, and dissecting all of that. It was hard to find a job after my English degree, but I figured it out. I think whatever job you have in the future, if you're able to bring your humanity to it, it will work out for you, too.”

Of course, some things, some passions, never change. One of the perks of working with large sports organizations like the Edmonton Oilers, she says, is that there are, occasionally, free tickets to games.

“I’ve come a long way to finally get those free seats!”