The Challenge

Barcardi’s marketing team was under real pressure to move on AI, and doing plenty of it. Individuals were experimenting. Leadership was supportive. But nobody could say with confidence where the team actually stood, whether the effort was adding up to anything, or what was holding the value back. The assumption going in was that some part of the team was resistant.

The Solution

Noetic administered the AI Readiness Assessment™ across their team, measuring five dimensions of readiness: exposure and orientation, curiosity, confidence, trust and judgment, and learning readiness. Every member received a personalized individual report, and leadership received a team synthesis that read the pattern across all of them rather than the scores one at a time.

WHAT WE FOUND

The assumption was wrong. Bacardi was not resistant to AI usage. Their confidence, trust and judgment, and learning readiness all landed in the high 80s and low 90s. This was a team psychologically ready for AI, with minimal fear and strong willingness to learn. The true challenge was their amount of exposure and orientation to AI usage. These scores ranked at the lower end and, more importantly, are quite unevenly distributed. AI use was personality-driven rather than process-driven. Experimentation was happening, but as individual initiative, not as a discipline. 

This finding reframed the work: mindset readiness existed, systems readiness did not. The team needed structured AI infused into their ways of working and consistent practices to ensure exposure would grow into habitual learning and skills.

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT

The readout translated directly into five development priorities the team could act on: a standardized AI pilot framework so experimentation became repeatable; AI-informed input required in campaign planning so AI moved from optional enhancement to expected contribution; quarterly knowledge-sharing to level out uneven exposure; central documentation of use cases and results to build institutional memory; and defined brand guardrails to protect quality and reinforce the team’s existing strength in judgment.

WHY IT MATTERED

Without the assessment, Bacardi would have kept investing in enthusiasm it already had. With it, leadership could see that the path from experimentation to competitive advantage ran through structural maturity and could name exactly which shifts would get them there.

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