Coca-Cola has made a $1.1 billion commitment to use Microsoft's cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) services.
The contract is part of a five-year agreement that will see Microsoft support Coca-Cola's core technology strategy systemwide.
The $1.1bn commitment will see Microsoft becoming Coca-Cola's preferred cloud and AI provider.
Coca-Cola will migrate all of its applications to Microsoft Azure. For the last year, the company has been using generative AI and has already been using Azure OpenAI service for its marketing, manufacturing, and supply chain business functions.
The two companies will continue to experiment with the Azure OpenAI Service, including seeing how Copilot could help with workplace productivity. Coca-Cola is currently seeing how it can improve customer experiences and streamline operations.
“This new agreement builds on the success of Coca-Cola’s partnership strategy with Microsoft, showing our commitment to ongoing digital transformation,” said John Murphy, president and chief financial officer of The Coca-Cola Company. “Our partnership with Microsoft has grown exponentially, from the $250 million agreement we initially announced in 2020 to $1.1 billion today.”
Neeraj Tolmare, senior vice president and global CIO for The Coca-Cola Company added: “Our expanded partnership with Microsoft is an important next chapter in Coca-Cola’s journey toward a digital-first enterprise powered by emerging technologies,” “Microsoft’s capabilities help accelerate our adoption of AI to create incremental enterprise value.”
Coca-Cola previously had a data center in Atlanta, where the company is headquartered. In 2009, it was in discussions with HP to outsource its data center operations. The company sold its Atlanta data center in 2017 to Rackhouse as part of its cloud migration plan. At that time, Coca-Cola was a customer of Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud.
