Coca-Cola and AI – what can we expect from this mind-blowing partnership?

Coca-Cola, the carbonated soft drinks giant is all set to tap into the AI arena for its marketing and digital communication. And that includes ChatGPT.

Striking a deal with the management consultancy company, Bain & Co., Coca-Cola is all set to exploring the use of OpenAI tools that include systems ChatGPT, DALL·E and Codex. Bain & Co. has already implemented OpenAI in its own operations and now offers help to its clients to adopt this as well.

Coca-Cola has said that the plan was to find ways to improve its business capabilities and operations and that it has seen opportunities to use AI to power its marketing efforts.

The brand is about 120 years old. And it is still the most-sipped soda worldwide.

One of its secrets to its massive success is that just about everyone is its target audience. Teenagers to health conscious adults, the affluent to the barely-getting-alongs, Coca-Cola targets just about everyone.

Its marketing campaigns are varied and impactful. And the brand positions itself as being socially responsible and conscious of the environment.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT, that Coca-Cola plans to use, is all the rage now – with the chat bot being able to answer questions and respond in a very human-like manner. The other AI technology that Coca-Cola plans to use is DALL·E, which has the ability to generate images based on words or phrases. And the third – Codex – can translate written instructions into code.

Without giving any details, Bain & Co. said that Coca-Cola’s plans for AI are “the most ambitious we have seen of any consumer products company.”

Just about anything!

Coca-Cola is known for its advertising – over the years, the brand has come up with some amazing campaigns. It is certainly not for lack of creativity that they have jumped on the AI bandwagon. With AI taking over copy and images, just about anything is possible, propelling the level of campaigns and commercials to a whole new level.

This news that Coca-Cola is tapping into AI and ChatGPT in particular will create such an incredible sense of expectation – everyone will let their imagination run riot about what and how their next campaign would be. The buzz and the hype (purely because of the lack of any details about Coca-Cola’s plans in this matter) are alone enough to create such euphoria and expectation among its audiences. Not to mention all the user-generated content (UGC) around this!

No one knows what is planned – everything is carefully kept under wraps. Maybe it will be a phenomenal campaign. Or maybe it may bomb. But regardless of whether it is a huge hit or if it bombs, Coca-Cola is a brand worth reckoning and they comfortably out-perform their targets and projections. If this campaign flops, they will just move on to something else. But if it succeeds, it will propel the brand into even greater heights.

In conclusion, it must be said that while all these AI-powered technologies are taking the world by storm, it is all still in its nascent experimental stages. We don’t think that this technology is able to produce any production-quality videos or images. At least, not yet.

So regardless of how well the ChatGPT converses or the DALL-E conjures up images, they are not quite there in that place where they can replace creative ad minds.

But magic can happen in the synergy of the two – sharp creative minds in partnership with AI-powered technology! That, will truly be something, worth waiting for!