Microsoft Corp. and Coca-Cola Co. announced a five-year strategic partnership aimed at exploring and harnessing the power of artificial intelligence. As stated in a Microsoft press release, as part of this partnership, the companies will "jointly experiment" with advanced technologies such as Azure OpenAI Service in order to develop innovative AI use cases for various business functions. Special attention will be paid to testing how the Copilot chatbot can improve employee productivity in the workplace. Coca-Cola's spending on Microsoft Cloud services and generative AI services under this partnership will amount to $1.1 billion, Microsoft said in a statement. In 2020, Coca-Cola entered into an agreement to use cloud and other software from Microsoft in the amount of $250 million. «The new agreement builds on a successful partnership strategy with Microsoft and confirms our commitment to further digital transformation,» said John Murphy, President and Chief Financial Officer of Coca-Cola. The company's management also noted that the partnership is developing exponentially – from $250 million in 2020 to $1.1 billion today.
