Microsoft just announced a major new partnership with a huge consumer company that plans to spend a lot of money to use Microsoft's services. In a press release today, Microsoft revealed its new five-year deal with The Coca-Cola Company.
The press release says Coca-Cola plans to spend $1.1 billion during the five-year plan on Microsoft's cloud and generative AI services. It says that the soft drink company has already moved its applications over to Microsoft's Azure, and it has been using the Azure OpenAI Service to help with marketing, its supply chain efforts, and more.
The press release says:
The company is currently exploring the use of generative AI-powered digital assistants on Azure OpenAI Service to help employees improve customer experiences, streamline operations, foster innovation, gain a competitive advantage, boost efficiency and uncover new growth opportunities.
In addition, Microsoft and Coca-Cola plan to jointly experiment with new services such as Copilot for Microsoft 365, to see if they can be used to help worker productivity.
Microsoft and Coca-Cola previously announced another five-year partnership in 2020, where Coca-Cola agreed to use Microsoft's Azure, Dynamics 365, and Microsoft 365 in its business. That included rolling out the use of Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams for its employees.
That agreement was made in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, and Coca-Cola used Microsoft 365 Live Events to hold virtual town meetings with its employees.
That older partnership saw Coca-Cola spending "just" $250 million to use Microsoft's services. this new agreement seems to show Coca-Cola is going on all in with Microsoft's generative AI vision for the future.
Earlier this week, Microsoft announced another new partnership, this time with Cognizant. The service and consulting company plans to purchase, among other things, 25,000 Microsoft 365 Copilot seats for its clients. However, the exact financial details of this deal were not revealed.
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