Dive Brief:
- The Coca-Cola Company will spend $1.1 billion in an expanded partnership with Microsoft to use the tech giant’s cloud and generative AI services, the companies said Tuesday.
- Coca-Cola plans to test Azure OpenAI Service and Copilot for Microsoft 365 use cases across business functions, according to the release. The beverage maker is running a generative AI-powered assistant pilot program on Azure OpenAI Service to improve customer experiences, streamline operations and identify growth opportunities.
- “Our expanded partnership with Microsoft is an important next chapter in Coca-Cola’s journey toward a digital-first enterprise powered by emerging technologies,” Neeraj Tolmare, SVP and global CIO at Coca-Cola, said in a statement. “Microsoft’s capabilities help accelerate our adoption of AI to create incremental enterprise value.”
Dive Insight:
Coca-Cola was an early adopter of generative AI.
The soda titan was one of the first businesses to begin testing ChatGPT Enterprise in workflows and has nearly a year of experience under its belt. The company also turned to ChatGPT to fuel marketing efforts. Coca-Cola appointed Pratik Thakar as VP and global head of generative AI in the marketing transformation office at the company last June.
Coca-Cola isn’t new to the cloud, either. The company migrated all its applications to Microsoft Azure as part of a partnership initiated in 2020. The five-year, $250 million cloud agreement and collaboration play announced four years ago, equipped Coca-Cola’s employees with Teams and 365 solutions.
“Our partnership with Microsoft has grown exponentially,” John Murphy, president and CFO at Coca-Cola, said in a statement.
Consumer-facing companies are beefing up tech capabilities up and down the food and beverage aisles.
PepsiCo began collaborating with the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence last June to develop best practices for responsible AI adoption. The company is also executing a broader multiyear productivity plan, moving forward on an ERP migration and has a vacant CIO role to fill.
Food and snack brands like General Mills and Kraft Heinz have also dipped into generative AI, rolling out LLM-based tools for employees and aiming for productivity gains and expanded data analytics capabilities.
