🎄 Coca-Cola’s AI Christmas Comeback

Also: Perplexity Fights Back Against Amazon

Author

Evolving AI
November 05, 2025

 In partnership with

Welcome, AI enthusiasts

Coca-Cola is bringing back its AI-powered holiday campaign, this time with smoother results and a new cast of animated animals. After last year’s bumpy debut, the brand says its updated approach made production faster and cheaper, even as critics call the new ads a little too flat. Let’s dive in!

In today’s insights:

  • Coca-Cola’s AI Christmas Comeback

  • Perplexity Fights Back Against Amazon

  • Shopify Bets on AI Shopping Boom

Read time: 4 minutes

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

Evolving AI: Coca-Cola brings back its AI-powered “Holidays Are Coming” campaign with fewer glitches and faster production, but not without criticism.

Key Points:

  • Coca-Cola used AI studios Silverside and Secret Level to produce its 2025 Christmas ads in just one month.

  • The AI generated over 70,000 clips, later refined by artists to improve realism and fix last year’s visual errors.

  • The new spots swap people for animals to avoid last year’s uncanny faces, yet viewers still call the results “off” and “soulless.”

Details:

Coca-Cola is doubling down on AI for its global holiday campaign after last year’s rocky debut. Partnering with Silverside AI and Secret Level, the brand produced new ads featuring animals instead of humans to avoid uncanny visuals. The ads still drew criticism for inconsistent animation and “flat” characters, but Coca-Cola says production was faster, cheaper, and more efficient. The process took about a month, far quicker and cheaper than traditional shoots. Over 70,000 AI-generated clips were refined by artists, involving around 100 people, including five AI specialists.

Why It Matters:

For marketers and creatives, Coca-Cola’s AI Christmas saga is a live stress test of what happens when a nostalgic brand leans hard into automated production: the company cuts production time from a year to about a month and leans on just five AI specialists to generate tens of thousands of clips, yet sentiment data shows a jump in negative reactions, complaints about “soulless” visuals and fears over displaced artists, even as many viewers shrug and keep watching. Brands across advertising are studying this playbook as generative tools spread through video production, and the lesson so far is that speed and scale are easy wins, emotional trust is the fragile part.

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PERPLEXITY & AMAZON
🥊 Perplexity Fights Back Against Amazon

Source: Reuters

Evolving AI: Perplexity calls Amazon a bully after being told to stop AI-driven shopping via its Comet browser.

Key Points:

  • Perplexity says Amazon sent a legal threat demanding it block users from buying through Comet.

  • Amazon claims the AI agent violates its rules and hurts the shopping experience.

  • Both companies are developing their own AI shopping tools, intensifying competition.

Details:

Perplexity AI says Amazon is trying to block its Comet browser from automating purchases on Amazon. The e-commerce giant argues Perplexity is gaining unauthorized access and degrading the customer experience. Perplexity disagrees, calling Amazon's stance anti-innovation. Ironically, Amazon is building its own AI shopping agents, like Rufus and Buy For Me, that let users ask questions and make purchases through chat.

Why It Matters:

With companies like Amazon working on assistant-shoppers and banks like Visa linking AI agents to credit cards, what used to be just clicking around now risks becoming a chore we hand off entirely. The fight between Amazon and Perplexity AI is really about who controls the path to purchase, and if the AI does it, you might skip the ad overload yet lose visibility into how decisions are made.

Source: ignitiv

Evolving AI: Shopify calls AI the biggest shift since the internet as agentic commerce takes shape.

Key Points:

  • Shopify says traffic from AI tools to its stores jumped 7x since January.

  • It’s teaming up with OpenAI, Perplexity, and Microsoft to make AI shopping mainstream.

  • The company’s new focus is “agentic commerce,” where AI agents shop for you.

Details:

Shopify is reshaping online retail around artificial intelligence. The company’s leadership described AI as not just a feature, but the foundation of everything it builds. Through partnerships with OpenAI, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot, Shopify aims to make AI-driven shopping part of everyday conversations. It’s already seeing massive growth in AI-generated traffic and purchases, signaling a clear shift in how people shop online.

Why It Matters:

Think about this: your next pair of running shoes, skincare haul or birthday gift could be picked out (and even bought) by an AI agent before you lift a finger. With traffic to Shopify stores from AI tools up 7× and orders up 11× since January this year, we’re well past the tip of the iceberg. For brands and marketers, that means the focus may shift from winning clicks to winning the AI-agent’s trust. If AI tools become the new storefronts, Shopify could be the platform that connects millions of merchants directly to AI-driven buyers.

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