Coca-Cola's bottler for Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei says 83% of the retailers who took part in a promotional campaign adopted recommendations from Perfect Basket, an AI-driven ordering feature built into its Coke Buddy retailer platform, according to reports published on 8 September by AI News and PYMNTS. Coke Buddy supports about 39,000 retail outlets across Malaysia.
How Perfect Basket works
Perfect Basket recommends specific products and order quantities before a retailer submits a purchase through Coke Buddy. The feature draws on a shop's previous orders, its ordering frequency, seasonality, weather and purchasing patterns among comparable businesses to generate each suggestion, and is served by what the company calls a central recommendation engine. Retailers keep the final decision on what to buy.
The adoption figure comes from a campaign that drew more than 4,500 entries from over 4,000 participating retailers. Coca-Cola says AI-generated orders allow its pre-sales staff to spend less time taking routine orders and more time on account development, positioning the tool as a change in how sales representatives use their day rather than a replacement for them.
Part of a wider push
Patrick Go, commercial director for Malaysia and Brunei at Coca-Cola Bottlers Malaysia-Singapore-Brunei, said Perfect Basket "brings relevant information together to provide a practical starting point for each order, while ensuring retailers retain control over their final decisions," according to PYMNTS.
The Malaysian deployment sits inside a much larger programme. Coca-Cola says nearly 8 million customers worldwide are connected to its business-to-business platforms, and that AI-enabled suggested ordering has reached more than 3 million outlets in Latin America. An earlier three-country pilot that fed weather and geolocation data into demand prediction produced sales 7% to 8% higher than at outlets not using the algorithm, the company says, and retailers in initial pilots were around 30% more likely to buy the specific products the system suggested. Neeraj Tolmare, Coca-Cola's chief information officer, oversees the technology programme.
All of these figures are self-reported by Coca-Cola and have not been independently verified. For a supplier that depends on small, independently owned shops for a large share of South-East Asian sales, automating order suggestions is aimed at reducing both stockouts and overstocking in a segment that is notoriously hard to forecast, since many of those shops track inventory by hand or from memory. Coca-Cola has not said whether or when Perfect Basket will expand to other markets, or whether it will publish the underlying sales figures behind the Malaysia campaign. PYMNTS reported separately that 75% of small and mid-sized businesses would use AI features offered by their financial institutions within two years, a figure that rises to 83% among businesses with more than $1 million in annual revenue.