15-05-2025
Meet Project Fizzion, Coca-Cola's big bet on an AI-powered design copilot
Back in the 1930s, Robert W. Woodruff, president of the Coca-Cola Co., would carry a red swatch in his wallet. Of course, it wasn't just any red. It was Coca-Cola red. And so anywhere he went and encountered his brand—painted on a wall, wrapping a refrigerator—he would pull out the little swatch to check that it matched.
Woodruff understood the importance of Coca-Cola's brand equity as it expanded globally—a challenge that has only grown since, now that Coca-Cola sells 2.2 billion servings a day across 200 countries, 150 languages, and 30 million points of sale.
But where Woodruff used a swatch, Coca-Cola's design team has spent the past four years dreaming up a modern operational upgrade to its 400 pages of brand guidelines. Teaming with Adobe, it developed Project Fizzion. Trained specifically on Coca-Cola's design logic, it's a brand-managing AI that lives inside Adobe platforms like Photoshop and Illustrator, generates designs, and, most of all, helps keep designers across the globe brand-compliant as they dream up the next big campaign.
In a design world that's equally dependent upon and terrified of generative AI tools, Coca-Cola is clear that Fizzion is not about cost cutting via AI. As it's integrating Fizzion globally, it's doing so with no reduction in spending on brand campaigns. Instead, the company believes it's charting a path forward that's sustainable for creatives to drive better work and eliminate headaches under deadline.
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