The Coca-Cola Company announces 5-year AI partnership with Microsoft

Soft drink brand The Coca-Cola Company has announced a five year partnership with Microsoft to develop the use of generative AI across its core systems. 

As part of the collaboration, The Coca-Cola Company has made the commitment to invest $1.1bn to Microsoft Cloud and its gen AI capabilities, including access to solutions such as Microsoft 365, Power BI, Dynamics 365, Defender, and Fabric to enhance efficiency and scalability. 

The drinks firm will also explore the use of gen AI digital assistants powered by Azure OpenAI Service to improve customer experiences, marketing campaigns, streamline supply chain operations, and more. The brand will also test and roll out Copilot under Microsoft 365 to improve workplace productivity. 

Neeraj Tolmare, Senior Vice President and Global Chief Information Officer for The Coca-Cola Company, said that the expanded partnership with Microsoft – which started in 2020 as a $250m agreement – marks an important next chapter into the brand’s journey towards “a digital-first enterprise powered by emerging technologies”. 

John Murphy, President and Chief Financial Officer at The Coca-Cola Company, added: “This new agreement builds on the success of Coca-Cola’s partnership strategy with Microsoft, showing our commitment to ongoing digital transformation.” 

The Coca-Cola brand has already been innovating with gen AI for nearly a year, having leveraged the Azure OpenAI Service – a coding and language AI model – in its marketing, manufacturing, supply chain and more. The brand has also migrated all its applications to Microsoft Azure, a cloud computing platform developed by Microsoft.

Judson Althoff, Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer at Microsoft, said: “Through our long-term partnership, we’ve made significant progress to accelerate systemwide AI transformation across The Coca-Cola Company and its network of independent bottlers worldwide.”

“We’re proud to support Coca-Cola as it continues to embrace the era of AI and looks to solutions like Azure OpenAI Service and Copilot to drive innovation across every area of its business.”

In March this year, Microsoft also announced a partnership with Adobe to deliver enhanced gen AI capabilities that can enable marketers to increase their collaboration, efficiency, creativity, and more.