Diving overview:
- As part of the company’s broader finance transformation, Coca-Cola is using artificial intelligence and scenario modeling tools to support marketing and commercial investment decisions, according to a presentation at Gartner’s 2026 Finance Symposium/Xpo.
- Speakers at a May 29 session at an event in National Harbor, Maryland, said investment decisions in the past have been hampered by fragmented analysis, with different teams interpreting the same data in different ways. This extended the discussion cycle before decisions were made and delayed responses to changing market conditions.
- What is often noticed at meetings is “We adjusted our follow-up, did more analysis, dug deeper… and by the time the team had an answer, the market had moved,” said Shelley Kench, head of global resource allocation at Coca-Cola. She was joined by Noah Muceres, a Bain & Company partner who supported the transformation.
Dive Insight:
The initiative reflects Coca-Cola CFO John Murphy’s broader focus on tightening resource allocation across the business.
“Resource allocation is not a new idea… but we think there’s an opportunity to do more with it. We think this could be our new secret sauce,” Murphy said at the New York Consumer Analyst Group Conference in February, according to the transcript.
The consumer goods industry faces an increasingly complex and volatile marketing environment due to factors such as economic uncertainty, slowing consumer demand, and an “explosion of media touchpoints and purchase paths,” according to a February report from Boston Consulting Group.
In early 2025, the company reported that three-quarters of marketing leaders at consumer goods companies view omnichannel investment allocation and activation as their biggest challenge. 68% of respondents cited organizational silos and poor internal collaboration as particularly significant barriers.
At the heart of Coca-Cola’s push is Fuel Light 360, the company’s proprietary platform designed to support teams across the business in evaluating potential marketing and commercial investments.
Murphy highlighted the tool in his remarks at the CAGNY conference, saying it will allow Coca-Cola to “narrow our focus on what will give us the most value for our investment and collectively think about how we can improve our capital allocation over time to support our business.”
At the Gartner event, Kench described the following situation: The company faced increased advertising pressure from competitors in the sugar-free soda space. In the past, teams may have debated whether to respond by increasing spending on TV, digital media, or in-store promotions, but often without a common framework for evaluating trade-offs.
He said Fuel Light 360 allows teams to model different investment scenarios in real time, helping to move the discussion from competing interpretations of data to deciding how to respond.
“What we’ve done is really moved from just meetings where we coordinate and discuss whose data is correct to making choices,” Kench said.
Muceres said the effort is ultimately about reengineering the decision-making process, not just introducing new technology. As a result, work that once required up to two weeks of follow-up analysis can now be completed in a single meeting.
“We redesigned meetings, designed tools around what users needed from meetings, and deployed both at the same time,” Museles says. “In terms of decision-making cycles, it went from two weeks to one hour,” the company said.
