Business
Coca-Cola in talks about potential cut-price £2bn sale of Costa Coffee | Coca-Cola
Costa Coffee could change hands again after it emerged that Coca-Cola has met potential buyers to discuss a cut-price deal to off-load the chain.
The American soft drinks company is said to be working with bankers on a review of Costa, Britain’s biggest coffee chain, that could lead to it being sold.
Coca-Cola had high hopes for the Costa brand when it bought it in 2018 from Whitbread, owner of the Premier Inn hotel chain, for £3.9bn. However, the chain has struggled with rising costs, not least the rise in coffee bean prices, and increased high street competition.
The sale of Costa could realise a multibillion-pound loss for Coca-Cola, according to City analysts. One told Sky News, which first reported the sale talks, that it could fetch just £2bn which would be nearly half what it had paid for the business.
Coca-Cola’s chief executive, James Quincey, told investors last month that Costa had “not quite delivered” and was “not where we wanted it to be from an investment hypothesis point of view”.
He added that the business was “in the mode of reflecting on what we’ve learned, thinking about how we might want to find new avenues to grow in the coffee category”.
Coca-Cola is said to have held talks with a small number of possible bidders, including private equity firms, according to Sky News, which cited unnamed sources.
The investment bank Lazard is reportedly helping Coca-Cola to review options for the chain and gauge interest from buyers. Preliminary offers are expected in early autumn, although the report noted that the drinks maker could decide not to proceed with a sale.
Costa has more than 2,000 outlets in the UK and early 18,000 employees. However, as well as rising costs it has faced competition from upmarket rivals, such as Pret a Manger and Gail’s.
Costa turned over £1.2bn in its 2023 financial year, according to the most recent annual accounts filed at Companies House, up from 9% on the previous year. However, it reported a pre-tax loss of £9.6m, compared with a profit of £245.9m the year before. Costa blamed the loss on inflationary pressures, as well as write-downs on the value of some investments.
after newsletter promotion
Costa, which was founded in 1971 by Italian brothers, Sergio and Bruno Costa, was sold to Whitbread for £19m in 1995. When Coca-Cola bought the business, Quincey said there were “great opportunities for value creation”.
While Costa’s financial performance has been mixed, last year it paid out £85m in dividends to its owner.
Coca-Cola and Lazard were approached for comment.
Integration of Falcon Shield with Salesforce Security Center and Charlotte AI with Agentforce delivers enhanced protection, visibility, and faster response for mission-critical AI agents, applications, and workflows
AUSTIN, Texas, September 16, 2025–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Fal.Con 2025, Las Vegas – CrowdStrike (NASDAQ: CRWD) and Salesforce, the world’s #1 AI CRM, today announced a new strategic partnership to enhance the security of AI agents and applications built on Agentforce and the Salesforce Platform. Through integrations between CrowdStrike Falcon® Shield and Salesforce Security Center, Salesforce admins and security professionals will gain enhanced visibility, compliance support, and protection for mission-critical workflows – simplifying operations and uniting business and security teams on a shared foundation of trust in the agentic era.
The partnership also enables customers to access CrowdStrike’s agentic security analyst, Charlotte AI, through Agentforce for Security and use it to work directly alongside teammates in Slack, flagging potential threats and recommending actions in a conversational manner as any other employee would.
As agents join the workforce, security teams must understand what they are doing, trace them back to their human creators, and prevent them from becoming over privileged or compromised. CrowdStrike and Salesforce are meeting this challenge by delivering the visibility and control needed to secure the future of AI-powered business.
“Adversaries are already targeting AI agents and applications with identity-based attacks. Together with Salesforce, we’re extending the power of the Falcon platform to protect mission-critical workflows and secure the next generation of AI-powered business,” said Daniel Bernard, chief business officer at CrowdStrike. “By integrating Falcon Shield into Salesforce Security Center and bringing Charlotte AI into Agentforce, business and security teams gain a unified view of risk and response – protecting today’s operations while enabling tomorrow’s AI-driven enterprise.”
“A key to unlocking the full potential of agentic AI lies in the ability to secure it,” said Brian Landsman, CEO of AppExchange and Global Partnerships at Salesforce. “Our partnership with CrowdStrike ensures that our customers can build their agentic enterprises on Salesforce while maintaining the highest standards of security and compliance.”
Through the integration of Falcon Shield, which provides visibility and automated response to threats targeting SaaS applications, with Salesforce Security Center, which provides one comprehensive view of permissions and controls across the company’s Salesforce environment, customers gain:
Business Wire – 20 minutes ago
Fal.Con 2025, Las Vegas – CrowdStrike (NASDAQ: CRWD) and Salesforce , the world’s #1 AI CRM, today announced a new strategic partnership to enhance the security of AI agents and applications built on Agentforce and the Salesforce Platform . Through integrations between CrowdStrike Falcon® Shield and Salesforce Security Center , Salesforce admins and security professionals will gain enhanced visibility, compliance support, and protection for mission-critical workflows – simplifying operations and uniting business and security teams on a shared foundation of trust in the agentic era.
The partnership also enables customers to access CrowdStrike’s agentic security analyst, Charlotte AI , through Agentforce for Security and use it to work directly alongside teammates in Slack, flagging potential threats and recommending actions in a conversational manner as any other employee would.
As agents join the workforce, security teams must understand what they are doing, trace them back to their human creators, and prevent them from becoming over privileged or compromised. CrowdStrike and Salesforce are meeting this challenge by delivering the visibility and control needed to secure the future of AI-powered business.
“Adversaries are already targeting AI agents and applications with identity-based attacks. Together with Salesforce, we’re extending the power of the Falcon platform to protect mission-critical workflows and secure the next generation of AI-powered business,” said Daniel Bernard, chief business officer at CrowdStrike. “By integrating Falcon Shield into Salesforce Security Center and bringing Charlotte AI into Agentforce, business and security teams gain a unified view of risk and response – protecting today’s operations while enabling tomorrow’s AI-driven enterprise.”
“A key to unlocking the full potential of agentic AI lies in the ability to secure it,” said Brian Landsman, CEO of AppExchange and Global Partnerships at Salesforce. “Our partnership with CrowdStrike ensures that our customers can build their agentic enterprises on Salesforce while maintaining the highest standards of security and compliance.”
Through the integration of Falcon Shield, which provides visibility and automated response to threats targeting SaaS applications, with Salesforce Security Center, which provides one comprehensive view of permissions and controls across the company’s Salesforce environment, customers gain:
- Visibility and Accountability: Trace agents to their human creators, enabling a clear chain of accountability and privilege governance.
- Proactive Risky Behavior Detection: Flag misconfigurations, overprivileged agents, and unusual activity inside Salesforce in real time.
- Automatic Threat Containment: Automate response actions with Falcon® Fusion – such as blocking risky access or disabling compromised agents – directly from Salesforce Security Center.
- Unified AI Agent Protection: Combine Falcon Shield, Falcon® Next-Gen Identity Security , and Falcon® Cloud Security to deliver end-to-end control over Agentforce agents and applications.
By bringing Charlotte AI into Slack through Agentforce for Security, CrowdStrike and Salesforce empower teams to quickly and efficiently handle security incidents without having to switch applications:
- Accelerated Incident Response: Instantly create dedicated incident channels in Slack to coordinate response.
- Conversational Threat Investigation: Use natural language to query Charlotte AI for immediate answers on threats, hosts, and data.
- Real-Time Remediation: Isolate compromised devices or take other response actions directly from Slack, ensuring swift containment.
Together, CrowdStrike and Salesforce deliver stronger protection and visibility for mission-critical workflows – enabling enterprises to embrace AI securely today while building the foundation for future innovation.
Availability :
- The Falcon Shield integration will be available from within the Salesforce Security Center and on the Salesforce AppExchange this year.
- Charlotte AI will be integrating into Slack via Agentforce for Security and available via the AgentExchange and Slack Marketplace this year.
About CrowdStrike
CrowdStrike (NASDAQ: CRWD), a global cybersecurity leader, has redefined modern security with the world’s most advanced cloud-native platform for protecting critical areas of enterprise risk – endpoints and cloud workloads, identity and data.
Powered by the CrowdStrike Security Cloud and world-class AI, the CrowdStrike Falcon® platform leverages real-time indicators of attack, threat intelligence, evolving adversary tradecraft and enriched telemetry from across the enterprise to deliver hyper-accurate detections, automated protection and remediation, elite threat hunting and prioritized observability of vulnerabilities.
Purpose-built in the cloud with a single lightweight-agent architecture, the Falcon platform delivers rapid and scalable deployment, superior protection and performance, reduced complexity and immediate time-to-value.
CrowdStrike: We stop breaches.
Learn more: https://www.crowdstrike.com/
Follow us: Blog | Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook | Instagram
Start a free trial today: https://www.crowdstrike.com/free-trial-guide/
© 2025 CrowdStrike, Inc. All rights reserved. CrowdStrike and CrowdStrike Falcon are marks owned by CrowdStrike, Inc. and are registered in the United States and other countries. CrowdStrike owns other trademarks and service marks and may use the brands of third parties to identify their products and services.
Forward-Looking Statements
This press release includes descriptions of products, features, or functionality which may not currently be generally available. Any such references are provided for informational purposes only. The development, release, and timing of all features or functionality remain at our sole discretion and may change without notice. These statements are subject to risks, uncertainties, and assumptions that may cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied. Customers should make purchasing decisions based only on services and features that are currently generally available. For more information on our existing offerings please talk to your CrowdStrike representative.
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250915962256/en/
AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky doesn’t lose sleep over whether AI models sound “woke” or “reactionary.”
Yudkowsky, the founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, sees the real threat as what happens when engineers create a system that’s vastly more powerful than humans and completely indifferent to our survival.
“If you have something that is very, very powerful and indifferent to you, it tends to wipe you out on purpose or as a side effect,” he said in an episode of The New York Times podcast “Hard Fork” released last Saturday.
Yudkowsky, coauthor of the new book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, has spent two decades warning that superintelligence poses an existential risk to humanity.
His central claim is that humanity doesn’t have the technology to align such systems with human values.
He described grim scenarios in which a superintelligence might deliberately eliminate humanity to prevent rivals from building competing systems or wipe us out as collateral damage while pursuing its goals.
Yudkowsky pointed to physical limits like Earth’s ability to radiate heat. If AI-driven fusion plants and computing centers expanded unchecked, “the humans get cooked in a very literal sense,” he said.
He dismissed debates over whether chatbots sound as though they are “woke” or have certain political affiliations, calling them distractions: “There’s a core difference between getting things to talk to you a certain way and getting them to act a certain way once they are smarter than you.”
Yudkowsky also brushed off the idea of training advanced systems to behave like mothers — a theory suggested by Geoffrey Hinton, often called the “godfather of AI — arguing it wouldn’t make the technology safer. He argued that such schemes are unrealistic at best.
“We just don’t have the technology to make it be nice,” he said, adding that even if someone devised a “clever scheme” to make a superintelligence love or protect us, hitting “that narrow target will not work on the first try” — and if it fails, “everybody will be dead and we won’t get to try again.”
Related stories
Business Insider tells the innovative stories you want to know
Business Insider tells the innovative stories you want to know
Critics argue that Yudkowsky’s perspective is overly gloomy, but he pointed to cases of chatbots encouraging users toward self-harm, saying that’s evidence of a system-wide design flaw.
“If a particular AI model ever talks anybody into going insane or committing suicide, all the copies of that model are the same AI,” he said.
Other leaders are sounding alarms, too
Yudkowsky is not the only AI researcher or tech leader to warn that advanced systems could one day annihilate humanity.
In February, Elon Musk told Joe Rogan that he sees “only a 20% chance of annihilation” of AI — a figure he framed as optimistic.
In April, Hinton said in a CBS interview that there was a “10 to 20% chance” that AI could seize control.
A March 2024 report commissioned by the US State Department warned that the rise of artificial general intelligence could bring catastrophic risks up to human extinction, pointing to scenarios ranging from bioweapons and cyberattacks to swarms of autonomous agents.
In June 2024, AI safety researcher Roman Yampolskiy estimated a 99.9% chance of extinction within the next century, arguing that no AI model has ever been fully secure.
Across Silicon Valley, some researchers and entrepreneurs have responded by reshaping their lives — stockpiling food, building bunkers, or spending down retirement savings — in preparation for what they see as a looming AI apocalypse.
-
Business3 weeks agoThe Guardian view on Trump and the Fed: independence is no substitute for accountability | Editorial
-
Tools & Platforms1 month ago
Building Trust in Military AI Starts with Opening the Black Box – War on the Rocks
-
Ethics & Policy2 months agoSDAIA Supports Saudi Arabia’s Leadership in Shaping Global AI Ethics, Policy, and Research – وكالة الأنباء السعودية
-
Events & Conferences4 months agoJourney to 1000 models: Scaling Instagram’s recommendation system
-
Jobs & Careers3 months agoMumbai-based Perplexity Alternative Has 60k+ Users Without Funding
-
Podcasts & Talks2 months agoHappy 4th of July! 🎆 Made with Veo 3 in Gemini
-
Education3 months agoVEX Robotics launches AI-powered classroom robotics system
-
Education2 months agoMacron says UK and France have duty to tackle illegal migration ‘with humanity, solidarity and firmness’ – UK politics live | Politics
-
Podcasts & Talks2 months agoOpenAI 🤝 @teamganassi
-
Funding & Business3 months agoKayak and Expedia race to build AI travel agents that turn social posts into itineraries