For Coca-Cola to take full benefit of the wave of innovation coming from developments in synthetic intelligence, the beverage large’s management group needed to be aligned on their AI playbook.
In January 2023 the producer of Dasani water, Fairlife milk, and the namesake Coke model created a cross-functional “digital council,” which consists of a number of senior leaders who got here collectively to get a full stock of all digital capabilities that had been being utilized throughout the corporate, together with AI.
This group discovered that whereas Coke was using AI and different applied sciences greater than anticipated, there was additionally some pointless duplication and digital work that was being achieved in silos. There additionally wasn’t a standardized system in place to measure affect.
John Murphy, Coca-Cola’s president and chief monetary officer, would chart a brand new course. The digital council, which he chairs, introduced in key C-suite leaders, together with chief advertising and marketing officer Manuel Arroyo and chief data officer Neeraj Tolmare, to make sure the right combination of views can be represented as Coca-Cola moved ahead with AI and different digital investments. All assets are targeted on three priorities: the buyer, clients together with the bottlers and retailers that Coca-Cola works with, and the way know-how can enhance work for company workers.
“It’s nothing greater than getting the precise individuals in a room who’ve the decision-making authority to align round an agenda that we expect goes to offer us essentially the most bang for the buck,” says Murphy.
Because of this, Coca-Cola’s AI utilization has proliferated throughout the corporate, usually targeted on maximizing scale at any time when attainable. Staff have embraced a ChatGPT device that conducts search queries based mostly on inner knowledge, whereas some external-facing functions embody an AI-generated Christmas advert and a partnership with Adobe that permits Coca-Cola’s designers to coach AI fashions all through numerous facets of their artistic course of, accelerating content material technology for the corporate’s greater than 200 manufacturers, that are offered in over 200 nations.
These sweeping AI investments are why Coca-Cola was ranked No. 6 on the Fortune AIQ 50 list, a rating of the highest Fortune 500 firms which have had essentially the most success in deploying AI.
Murphy says Coca-Cola’s AI journey has additionally benefited from robust partnerships with key AI innovators, together with Microsoft, Adobe, and SAP, in addition to a management group that has personally embraced AI and is keen to share their very own experiences with the know-how. Murphy, for example, says he has leaned on AI to assist with some writing duties and to conduct analysis.
“If I’m not deploying and studying easy methods to use the ChatGPTs, Claudes, and Geminis of the world, how can I anticipate others to comply with swimsuit?” asks Murphy.
When the CFO created Coca-Cola’s digital council, Arroyo was the primary govt he invited to affix.
“We’re a advertising and marketing and innovation firm at coronary heart,” explains Murphy. “If I’m not married to him, we’re not off to an ideal begin.”
In keeping with Arroyo, AI is already altering each main pillar of the advertising and marketing group, together with media planning, capturing related shopper insights, and the creation and manufacturing of visible and video property.
“AI actually helps and drives the effectiveness and effectivity of our advertising and marketing,” says Arroyo.
He notes that whereas Coca-Cola has near 2,000 advertising and marketing workers globally, solely two of them have the phrase “AI” of their job titles. This displays the expectation internally that everybody, from the senior leaders all the best way down, should embrace AI of their common workflows.
As CIO, Tolmare says he focuses AI bets on the functions of the know-how which have the greatest ability to scale across the organization.
“The tenet of how we consider generative AI, or now agentic AI, is not only ‘Can it really ship worth on this pocket of the world?’” says Tolmare. “However quite, ‘Can it really scale?’”
He shares an instance of a buyer ordering pilot program centered on an algorithm that blends generative and conventional types of AI to triangulate historic gross sales knowledge at any particular retail location, in addition to inputs from gross sales tendencies within the broader area and key exterior elements that have an effect on demand patterns, just like the climate. The AI fashions sift by means of all of that knowledge to foretell what future buyers will purchase once they come into the shop.
By higher predicting demand, Coca-Cola says that retail store house owners can higher plan their inventory ranges, avoiding any misplaced gross sales that will happen when manufacturers are out of inventory. Tolmare says Coca-Cola noticed a 5% to twenty% improve in month-to-month gross sales on the roughly 1,000 shops the place it examined this use of AI.
And past that, Coca-Cola is sharing these findings with every particular person outlet, delivering personalised messages which might be crafted utilizing AI and despatched by way of WhatsApp. Retail retailer house owners get extra granular recommendation on what to purchase from bottlers, which may in flip improve their gross sales and earnings.
“As soon as we knew that this was really working, we are actually scaling it throughout nearly all of our bottling companions world wide,” says Tolmare.
Learn extra lessons from the Fortune AIQ 50, the most recent Fortune AIQ particular report. This assortment of tales particulars how firms on the inaugural Fortune AIQ 50 checklist have made vital progress integrating synthetic intelligence know-how into their operations, resulting in actual affect.
