A feature inside Coke Buddy called Perfect Basket, goes further, using Coca-Cola’s Central Recommendation Engine to analyze previous orders, ordering frequency, seasonal demand, weather and purchasing trends among similar businesses, recommending specific products and quantities for an individual outlet.
83% of Retailers Adopted Coca-Cola’s AI Pick
The retailer still makes the final call. “Retailers understand their businesses best, but identifying the right assortment, pack mix and complementary products can take time,” Patrick Go, commercial director for Malaysia and Brunei at Coca-Cola Bottlers Malaysia-Singapore-Brunei, said, according to PriceShop Malaysia. “Perfect Basket brings relevant information together to provide a practical starting point for each order, while ensuring retailers retain control over their final decisions.”
That distinction matters because an inventory recommendation is also a working-capital decision. Every additional case a small retailer orders requires cash upfront and occupies shelf space until it sells, so ordering too little risks an empty shelf while ordering too much leaves money tied up in inventory that isn’t moving.
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Coke Buddy now serves about 39,000 retail outlets across Malaysia, PriceShop Malaysia reported. Among participating outlets, 83% adopted Perfect Basket’s recommendations when placing orders through Coke Buddy, according to Coca-Cola. The company also said retailers who followed the recommendations recorded stronger sales revenue growth than comparable outlets during the campaign, though it did not disclose the size of that difference.
Go said the strong participation shows retailers’ openness to the digital tools built into Coke Buddy, and that Coca-Cola plans to keep refining both Coke Buddy and Perfect Basket using retailer feedback.
Inventory Data Could Unlock Small Business Financing
The next opportunity may be financial. Small merchants often have less financial data available to lenders than larger companies, but a digital ordering platform like Coke Buddy generates a different kind of record: what a retailer buys, how frequently it replenishes and how its purchasing patterns shift as demand changes. That mismatch already shows up further up the supply chain among goods and logistics companies. Among businesses with $1 million to $25 million in annual revenue, 28% identify flexible credit tied to inventory as an essential need, a share that rises to 46% among businesses with $25 million to $50 million in revenue, according to PYMNTS Intelligence’s “Emerging Middle Market” report.
Nearly half of those companies, 49%, said better system integration between their operating data and their financing was an essential need, rising to 53% among the largest firms surveyed. A distributor, the report found, can know what inventory it needs to order next week before its own financing system even knows the purchase exists, the same disconnect that shows up at the retail level Coca-Cola is targeting through Coke Buddy.
Small businesses are already showing real appetite for exactly this kind of AI-driven financial tool: 75% of small and mid-sized businesses say they would use at least one AI feature offered by their financial institution within the next two years, rising to 83% among businesses generating more than $1 million in annual revenue, according to PYMNTS Intelligence’s “Credit Union Tracker Series,” June/July 2026 edition. A lender that could estimate how quickly an order is likely to sell might eventually assess financing against expected inventory turnover, rather than relying solely on a retailer’s conventional financial statements.
For Coca-Cola, better recommendations can mean better product availability and potentially more sales. For the retailer, getting the quantity right determines how much cash sits on the shelf rather than circulating back into the business.
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