When Corporate Cost-Cutting Masquerades as Innovation
There’s something deeply unsettling about watching a multinational corporation celebrate the fact that they used “even fewer people” to create their annual Christmas advertisement. Coca-Cola’s latest AI-generated Christmas ad has dropped, and while the company frames it as pushing boundaries and embracing the future, I can’t shake the feeling that we’re witnessing something darker unfold in real-time.
Let me be clear: the technology itself is genuinely impressive. Compared to last year’s rather uncanny attempt, this year’s ad shows remarkable progress. The quality jump is undeniable, and from a purely technical standpoint, watching AI video generation evolve this rapidly is fascinating. I’ve spent enough time in IT and DevOps to appreciate the engineering achievement behind it. But here’s the thing – just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should, and it certainly doesn’t mean we should be applauding corporations for weaponising it against their own workforce.
The genie is indeed out of the bottle, as Coca-Cola’s spokesperson so helpfully reminded us. But what bothers me most is the almost gleeful way they’re announcing that they needed fewer human beings to create this work. This isn’t about innovation for its own sake. It’s not about pushing creative boundaries or exploring new artistic possibilities. It’s about one thing: reducing labour costs while maintaining a public-facing image of being cutting-edge and forward-thinking.
And here’s the kicker – it’s working as a marketing strategy. The controversy alone has generated more attention than the ad itself probably deserves. People are arguing about it online, sharing it, dissecting it. That’s free advertising, and Coca-Cola knows it. They’re not just selling soft drinks (not that I’d drink the stuff anyway – give me a proper batch brew any day), they’re selling the idea that replacing human creativity with algorithms is somehow progressive.
The discussion around Universal Basic Income in response to AI-driven unemployment keeps coming up, and I understand why. When I see predictions that we’ll have full AI-generated movies and TV shows by 2030, I don’t think those predictions are outlandish anymore. The pace of progress is genuinely staggering. But UBI feels like a band-aid solution to a gunshot wound. It addresses the symptom – people not having money – without addressing the underlying problem of what happens to society when the relationship between work, purpose, and survival fundamentally changes.
We’re barrelling toward a future where creative work, something that has always been distinctly human, can be automated away. And I’m not just talking about advertising. I’m talking about the graphic designer who spent years honing their craft, the video editor who knows exactly how to pace a scene for maximum emotional impact, the creative director with decades of experience understanding what resonates with audiences. All that knowledge, all that human expertise, potentially rendered obsolete so that quarterly earnings reports look a bit better.
What really gets under my skin is the inequality of it all. The technology isn’t going to eliminate work for everyone – it’s going to eliminate work for specific groups of people while concentrating even more wealth and power at the top. The executives making these decisions aren’t automating themselves out of jobs. The shareholders aren’t the ones facing redundancy. It’s always the workers, the creatives, the people without the power to push back effectively.
Someone in the online discussion made a brilliant point about democracy needing to level up to handle this transition. Right now, we have massive centralised power in corporations making decisions that will affect millions of lives, while the rest of us are left scrambling to adapt. That’s not democracy – that’s oligarchy with better PR. And when you’ve got wealth inequality at the levels we’re seeing now, the idea that we’ll collectively come together to demand and implement the systemic changes needed feels… optimistic, to say the least.
But here’s where I try to pivot away from pure doom and gloom. Because I do think there’s a path forward, even if it’s not the one we’re currently on. The key is recognising that AI doesn’t have to be deployed in a way that simply replicates and amplifies existing power structures. The technology itself is somewhat neutral – it’s the economic system and power dynamics that determine how it’s used.
We need to start having serious conversations about what we want our future to look like, not just accepting whatever version gets imposed on us by corporations seeking to maximise shareholder value. That means demanding transparency about how AI is being deployed in the workplace. It means strengthening unions and worker protections before mass displacement happens, not after. It means questioning whether the current economic model makes any sense in a world where human labour becomes increasingly optional.
The Coca-Cola ad is just one small example, but it’s a symptom of a larger pattern. Companies are racing to implement AI not because it necessarily creates better outcomes, but because it’s cheaper and they can. And until we collectively push back on that logic, until we demand that technological progress should benefit everyone rather than just those already at the top, we’re going to keep seeing more of the same.
The genie might be out of the bottle, but we still get to decide what wishes we make. And right now, I don’t think enough of us are wishing for the right things.