EP 417: Using Microsoft AI to Create Real Magic with Coca-Cola

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You can create something magical with AI. I think a lot of times when we talk about artificial intelligence and generative AI and now we're talking so much copilot, we think about saving time, we think about productivity, and don't get me wrong, generative AI does all of those things, but I think you can go more. We always talk about how can you connect more with your consumers in an a. In an age where sometimes it seems like AI makes things impersonal. Well, we're going to be talking about that today and a lot more on Everyday AI. What's going on, y'?

All?

My name is Jordan Wilson and I'm the host of Everyday AI and this is a daily live stream podcast and free daily newsletter helping us all not just learn about AI, but how we can keep up and get ahead. And we do that by talking with some of the smartest people in the world. And today is no different. So if you're joining us on the podcast, thank you. As always, make sure to check out your show notes and go to your everydayai.com to sign up for that free daily newsletter. Before we get started, have to give a quick shout out to our partners at Microsoft Word. So why should you listen to the Worklab podcast from Microsoft? Because it's the place to find actionable insights to guide your organization's AI transformation. Tune in to learn how to think more creatively about unlocking the full potential of the technology. That's W O R K L A B, no spaces, available wherever you get your podcasts. All right, let's get to the show. If you're here to hear the daily news, that'll be in the newsletter as well. We are actually live at the Microsoft Ignite conference here in Chicago. So our livestream audience sees that and I'm joined by two very smart people and I'm excited to talk about how we can create some magical experiences with AI. So please help me welcome Pratik Thakur. He is the global VP of Generative AI at the Coca Cola Company. Pratik, thank you for joining us.

Thank you, thank you.

All right, and then we have Marco Casalina, the VP of products for Azure AI at Microsoft. Marco, thank you for joining us.

Thank you for having me.

All right, we have a rare 2 for 1 treat here at Everyday I. So I'm excited about this and you know, like I said, we are still live here at the Ignite conference in Chicago. But I'm. I'm excited to talk about creating magic. So we're going to be putting this in the newsletter. So don't worry because you're going to hear a description of something that I think is really cool. I did it myself this morning. But Pratik, tell us a little bit about this Create Real Magic campaign from the Coca Cola company.

Sure, sure. So Create Real magic. We wanted to give an invitation our consumers globally to bring Christmas experience and that feeling to their daily life or their kind of a Christmas experience. Now how do we bring that and make it very distinctive? Right. First thing you know, Coca Cola created Santa the way we see Santa and we understand Santa in 1931. So we took our Santa San Blanc Santa from our archive and we wanted that Santa to be conservative, conversative. So we knew that conversational AI is going to be big. Conversational AI is going to create unique experiences. And we wanted to be first in that. So one side, we want to stay ahead of the curve in this, the way we adopt technology in our marketing. But the other side, we wanted to root it into our who we are and what's our heritage. And that's where the Santa comes in. And we knew that consumers. And when I was young, I always wanted to talk to Santa. Now when you go to a shopping mall or any festivals, Christmas festival, markets, you can go to Santa. You shake hand, you get a gift, but you don't have an opportunity to have a conversation. You can't ask questions and sit down. What if we bring that experience and everyone will enjoy that? That's only Coke can do. So that was the starting point. And then we work with Microsoft Team and many other partners to bring that to life. We created digital twin 3D avatar of Versanta. Then we bring Microsoft tools to make him truly multilingual. So it transcends the boundary. It actually speaks your language from Japanese to Spanish to German to French to even Portuguese, Brazilian, Portuguese, very specific dialect, 26 different language. He needs to speak in special Santa tone. And this time, first time we brought Santa from archive. Otherwise you have always seen Santa in a static mode. We wanted to bring him in the right way. That's where we work together and train the models. That was a great experience working with Microsoft Team and everyone else. We worked with Leonardo AI in Australia. They actually. So once you talk to Santa and Santa will ask you about your Christmas memories. And once you. Every conversation is unique. It's real time conversation like the way we are having conversation. So once you give memory, he will probe you, he will ask you more details and then he will say, okay, I'm going to make a snow globe for you. The snow globe which gets created based on your conversation and your Christmas memory, which you can actually take it and share it on your social media or send it to your loved ones. So that's the whole journey. But then to bring this together, there was no real off the shelf tools were available. So we wanted to work with our partners. And that's where Microsoft opened up their R and D doors for us. And our team worked, our tech emerging technology team, our marketing technology team worked with Microsoft to make this happen. And that's now it's live. You can try it out.

Yeah, and I did it this morning. It was delightful. I haven't talked to Santa, obviously in like 30 some years, but I want to get back to that in a second critique. But Marco, I want to ask you because, like, I started the show off. I think when people talk about AI, sometimes it gets a bad rap. Right? Like people think of it as very impersonal. And I don't know, when I was talking to Santa this morning, I thought it was pretty personal. Right. It gives you some emotions. But maybe could you talk about it a little bit from the Azure perspective and how, you know, all of this new technology that we're hearing about here at Ignite it is for more than just saving time.

Yeah, absolutely. What's really interesting about what you guys did, and I also talked to Santa and it made me a snow globe here in Chicago of the Magnificent Mile and that kind of thing. One of the things that this new technology enables and that we're enabling now with the Azure AI foundry is to think beyond the chatbot. Yeah. Everybody thinks of AI as like you type to it, it types to you kind of chatgpt style. And what you guys did is way beyond that. Right. I mean, the fact is you could talk to this thing. I mean, you have it in 26 different languages. The underlying AI can speak even more than that. We had it speaking Telugu this morning. We had it speaking Hindi this morning. So, you know, this technology can speak in all these different languages. It can kind of personalize its message. And it doesn't just have to be a chatbot. You know, it can be this kind of interactive experience where indeed you are talking to Santa. I don't know. I hope you can post the URL over here so everybody on the. We will try this out.

Yeah, yeah. And you brought up a good Point there, Marco, in that AI is multimodal. Right. I think it took so long for many, even enterprise companies to fully get on board with generative AI that initially people just thought of it as bits and bytes. They thought of it as just text. Can you speak a little bit before we dive back into the Create Real Magic campaign? Can you speak a little bit on what the Azure, the new Foundry offers and even the fact that now it's multimodal, Right.

Well, the Foundry offers. I mean, there is a web portal in there and you can kind of go in there and try out all these different services. You could try the real time playground where you can talk to it and that kind of thing. And the multimodal capabilities, put in images and have it cogitate on that. So there's this web portal, there is an SDK. It's kind of the programming model that you use to actually integrate this stuff into your applications. And the other thing that we announced here at Ignite is the new agent service. Because when you think about it, I mean, where AI is going now is because, you know, it's not just a chatbot, but it's also not just question answering either. Now it's going to a place where it's going to take action on your behalf. I mean, yesterday, in front of a live audience here of hundreds of people, I built an agent on the fly that can make bookings in my Outlook calendar. It actually takes actions on my behalf. It can do all these kinds of things, you know, connect to third party systems and Outlook and Dynamics and, you know, SAP and all these things. It can do stuff for you. It doesn't just have to answer questions anymore. And in the case of your application, I mean, it did something for me. It made me a snow globe.

Yeah. And maybe Pratik, let's talk about that a little more because, you know, you know, when I asked you the first question, you talked about, you know, kind of the history of, you know, Santa and Coca Cola and going back to 1931. As strange as it sounds, I think some of my earliest thoughts as a kid of Santa were probably in those very, you know, nostalgic and classic Coca Cola commercials with Santa. So can you talk a little bit about that process and maybe even some of the challenges, right, of still, you know, paying kind of homage to that nostalgic, you know, Santa Claus of old, of Coca Cola company and still preserving that and giving consumers this new experience. Talk a little bit about what that was like and the process to still make it that authentic Coca Cola Santa.

Absolutely, absolutely. So one thing at Coca Cola marketing.

We.

Take care and we're very obsessed about is keeping roots into our heritage and who we are. So that's why you have seen that Coca Cola logo has not changed from very, very long. It's 140 year old or young company, but the enterprise has that belief that it's an icon. It's not logo, it's a pop culture icon. And so is Santa. Santa is a pop culture character and everyone has their Santa stories and their imageries and all those elements. And now we are talking to new generation. So we need to look at things from how we bring, we keep the connected to who we are, our originality and our authentic perspective of the brand, but then bring those experiences and engagement in much more cutting edge way. So that was the starting point now with that Santa. Yes, we went, we spent a lot of time in our archive looking at how his forehead looks like and what was the original painting and multiple paintings and how his dress looks like, what is different than others, other imagery of Santa around how we can create this authentic Santa from 1931 and bring it to. So that a lot of work from our design team, our global design team. So that's one thing working with this company called Mimic Production in Germany, they helped us create this 3D avatar digital tween. And then we wanted to make sure that this Santa is not kind of a one time you can have conversation and get bored. So it's very authentic. It's real time. You can ask any question, you can ask any, it's not just no globe related question, but you can ask question about reindeer or what's the weather in Lapland or all sorts of why, how he distributes the gifts.

Oh, interesting. I should have grilled my Santa.

So yeah, so you can ask those kind of very authentic questions. Whatever comes to your mind related to Santa and Christmas and he will, he will keep, he will converse with you. Right. So that element of engagement is very important. That's a deep engagement because people come to this kind of platform. They put their data, they put, they come. We want them to have a very unique and authentic experience, which only Coca Cola can do.

Yeah. And speaking of experiences, Pratik, I want to ask you maybe zoom out a little bit because it seems like, you know, Coca Cola Co. One of the most iconic brands ever, has really leaned into generative AI and. Right. You're very involved in that. I, I remember seeing, you know, the AI Coca Cola flavors and you know, recently I know there's There was even a couple series of AI commercials. Right. Tapping into the nostalgic commercials around Christmas time. But maybe talk about maybe some of the other efforts that the Coca Cola company has been making around generative AI and the response too, because everyone's talking about those, the AI commercials right now. I thought they were great, by the way.

Thank you. So we started working with Gen in mid 2022 before GPT got launched. Actually we worked with Stability AI in preparation of our another campaign called the Masterpiece. You may have seen that film where the bottle travels through different paintings. And we are working with Andy Warhol foundation and many other art estates. So that's where we needed to actually bring sophistication of perfection of the art. Right. And every art we were working with, we needed to understand their brushstrokes. And the art came from different genre, different century, different time. So we had to understand. And that's where Genai started using. And that's how it was my introduction to Gen AI that way in practice. And then we were the first one to collaborate with our OpenAI early 23 and with Bain Alliance. We went into that partnership. We were the first early when everyone was so skeptical about what's GEN and what's OpenAI even we went into that partnership and then we did this year 3000. We created. Co created a flavor of year 3000, the future taste of future with AI. So we used AI. What we want to do again, we want to create experience, not ads. And I'll come to the story, the films you mentioned, those films are also coming from 1995, 30 years back. Those films got created and we cherish them. They're part of our history and we are so much proud of Holidays are Coming. That jingle, that song, that film, it has its timeless and what we wanted to do, we wanted to. We said let's take this now. Those films, some films where we create, we need. The need of that film is to show reality. The real humans drinking food, drinking and eating food and all those. Some of the films requires fantastical hyper realistic treatment. Holidays are Coming film comes in that genre fantastical hyper realistic. And AI as a tool does much better job in fantastical world. In that type of imagination versus the realistic world. Sure. So that's why we needed to. We said okay, for this particular project Gen AI makes perfect sense. So we need to use every technology for right reason. And for this one it made perfect sense to us. Then we actually went to three different production studios. One in la, one in San Francisco, a tech lab actually. And One in Kuala Lumpur, in Malaysia. And we said, we gave them the brief. We said, look, we want to reimagine this with technology. Use whatever technology you need. We actually gave them some guidance about using Runway ML or Luma Labs or Leonardo AI because they are our kind of long term partners. But the other side, we told them that stay on the narrative, keep your human. Human. Creative directors decides. So all the creative decisions are made by human. But then superpower of imagination got unlocked by AI and that's the perfect combination for any next level kind of work. It's kind of human and machine working together. And we thought we go to three and maybe couple of them or one of them will work out well. All three worked out well. And then all three had a slightly different storyline, but it stays on the same brief. And we said, why don't we just take all three and kind of put it out to people? And that's what we did. Now we are really proud of that work. It has created a lot of debates and discussions and we respect every point of view. But what we saw, a lot of people are coming and saying that. My first reaction was, how can why Coca Cola is doing this? But then when I saw made sense to us. And then when we saw the long version and it's kind of in its full beauty, it started working for us and kind of for then. And that's where a lot of people actually research agencies are doing their independent research on that. Because the quality of whatever other benchmark we had for filmmaking, AI filmmaking has changed now.

Yeah, absolutely.

So that's one thing. Another one is like consumers don't think like, hey, I'm looking at EI film or I'm looking CGI film. Consumer sees that. Okay. It kind of connects with me. It has that music for this. All three film is created by real humans. So we rescored music three times with three different group of musicians.

I didn't know that.

So that's real. Okay.

Yeah.

So. So those kind of things. It's a right mix, it's the right balance where humans and machines coming together and creating something which is not yet created. And we as a Coca Cola company want to stay ahead of the curve. Yeah. And keep pushing that well up.

Yeah, I love that. And that's such a great example. So you know. All right, let's take a quick break to shout out our partners at the Microsoft WorkLab PODC. So why should you listen to the Worklab podcast from Microsoft? It explores the questions business leaders are asking. How can they guide their Organization's AI adoption journey. How can AI help them maximize value and create new products and business models? How should they help their team reskill for this new era of work? Why is it important to be completely transparent about when and how you use AI? Find the answers on Worklab. That's W O R K L A B no spaces available wherever you get your podcasts. As we wrap up here, you know, Marco, I'm going to ask you because Pratik just gave us a great example of, you know, one of the biggest companies in the world, how they're using generative AI in Azure and, you know, everything that we've been hearing about at the Ignite conference here to really reimagine what their relationships look like with consumers. So how would you say or what would you encourage as we wrap up, you know, decision makers who are saying, hey, how can we start using Copilot more or Copilot better or, you know, Azure Foundry? Like, what's your takeaway for those people listening?

Well, I mean, taking it back to what they did with the real magic here, trustworthy AI is really the key. And, you know, you think about what you guys did, I mean, you're exposing this to the world. You expect a bunch of kids to be using this stuff. And we work together a lot on, well, we have these products that enable trustworthy AI so that it doesn't go off the rails, so that Santa doesn't say weird stuff. So that if people say weird stuff to Santa, Santa deflects it. He's like, you know what, let's keep talking about Christmas and reindeer and stuff like that. So I think, I think key to the Azure AI foundry and really all the AI we do is this notion of trustworthy AI. And that certainly is key to the success of any AI project, including CoCA Cola's real magic.

Absolutely, Marco. And that's one thing for films. Also, we had to work with our production studios to say, what is our ethical prompting strategy? So we had given them guidelines and they all kind of followed that prompting strategy and they need to give back us their prompts. So we keep that check because this is new, this is experiment, this is. We are pushing the envelope, but we need to be responsible. So that's where our legal team, our tech team, our design team, everyone coming together and kind of protecting what we need to protect as a responsible brand and as a company. But same time, push the envelope and let's do something new and cutting edge.

I love that. I love that. And you know, as, as we wrap up Here, y'.

All.

I think that was a great one, two punch here of Pratik and Marco. Just really helping us and hopefully helping you all look at Generative AI maybe in a different way through this Create Real Magic campaign from the Coca Cola Company. I think that we all just got a very unique firsthand perspective of ways that you can actually create real and magical connections with consumers. So, Marco and Pratik, thank you so much for taking time out of your day to join the Everyday AI show. We really appreciate it.

Thank you.

Thank you for having us.

Thank you.

All right. Right. And hey, y', all, that was a lot. And I know we were talking a lot about these campaigns and you probably want to go create some real magic too with the Coca Cola Santa. So make sure if you haven't already, go to your everydayai.com Sign up for the free daily newsletter and we're going to be recapping and sharing some. I think we're going to have some behind the scenes on. On how all of it was made as well. So thank you for tuning in and make sure to join us tomorrow and every day for more Everyday AI. Thanks, y'.

All.

And that's a wrap for today's edition of Everyday AI. Thanks for joining us. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave us a rating. It helps keep us going for a little more AI magic. Visit your everydayai.com and sign up to our daily newsletter so you don't get left behind. Go break some barriers and we'll see you next time.