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Coca-Cola is doubling down on generative AI. A year after its first AI-generated holiday campaign drew mixed reactions and anger, the company leaned even further into the technology this holiday season. Pratik Thakar, the Coca-Cola Company’s global vice president and head of generative AI, said there’s no retreating from AI. “The genie’s out of the bottle,” he told an audience Monday at ADWEEK’S Brandweek 2025 event in Atlanta. “You either lead with it, or you keep crying about it.” While last year’s AI-generated Christmas ad spurred backlash and anger from parts of the creative community, it turned out to be one of Coca-Cola’s most effective holiday campaigns with consumers. According to Thakar, research firm Kantar ranked it as the top-performing Christmas ad globally last year across all categories—a result that encouraged the company to continue experimenting with generative tools. “It worked for our business,” he said. “That’s what motivated us to keep going.” Thakar added that while some in the industry criticized the ad’s visuals, such as the way “wheels weren’t moving properly,” consumers didn’t see it through that lens. “We took that as positive feedback,” he said, noting that this year’s campaign benefitted from major advances in AI-generated cinematography, physics, and rendering quality. Embedding AI throughout Despite early skepticism, Coca-Cola has emerged as one of the most visible case studies of how a global brand can operationalize generative AI beyond marketing experiments. The global beverage brand partnered with OpenAI in 2023, shortly after it launched ChatGPT, Thakar said, adding that Coca-Cola’s approach has been to embed AI into existing teams rather than build a separate department. Thakar’s comments underscore a broader shift among brand leaders who see generative AI not as a passing trend or cost-cutting measure, but as an inevitable force reshaping how products are made, marketed, and managed. It also signals how legacy marketers are trying to turn early creative wins into long-term business transformation. “The global Christmas campaign is our year’s biggest business opportunity. [Would we] want to do cost cutting with your biggest business opportunity? No, at least not at Coca-Cola,” Thakar said. Coca-Cola is also experimenting with AI through more than a dozen incubators with major tech companies, gaining early access to models to test how the technology can drive creativity and efficiency, he added. Beyond marketing, the company is now applying AI to research and development, supply chain, and knowledge management—but without creating a separate AI department. “We don’t want to, we shouldn’t [separate AI] because then it becomes a silo,” Thakar said.
