When Sue Eilfield joined Coca-Cola Europacific Partners (CCEP) a decade ago, the global bottling giant was still running talent operations on PowerPoint and Excel.
“It felt like the 1970s,” the VP of Culture and Leadership joked onstage at Cultivate ’25 in London.
Fast-forward to today, and CCEP has 41,000 employees across 31 countries, an AI-powered Career Hub, a global talent ecosystem, and even an internal AI academy — all part of a sweeping evolution that started with one big realization: leaders couldn’t see the talent already in their organization.
In this wide-ranging conversation, Eilfield and Eightfold Co-CEO Chano Fernandez to discuss how CCEP has tackled workforce visibility, built a skills-based approach to talent, and used early employee feedback to drive both design and adoption.
They also touch on the promise of agentic AI, how to scale innovation without losing the human touch, and the power of a clear vision paired with the right technology partner.
It’s a story of huge change — messy, human, very real and necessary.
[Ed note: Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.]
Sue Eilfield, VP, Culture & Leadership at CCEP, discusses how her organization envisions using agentic AI in the near future.
Chano Fernandez: Your organization has done a terrific job transforming. Give us a little bit of understanding on who Coca-Cola Europacific Partners is and what is your role within your organization.
Sue Eilfield: I lead culture and leadership, which is a global part of our organization. Coca-Cola Europacific Partners has been one of the largest bottlers for the Coca-Cola system, so we’re separate from The Coca-Cola Company.
When I joined 10 years ago, [CCEP] was purely doing bottling for the organization for Europe — northern Europe, in particular, in 13 countries for about 10,000 employees. Over the last 10 years, we’ve grown significantly by acquisition and merger. We’re now an organization in 31 countries with 41,000 colleagues and a $20 billion revenue.
It’s a large organization, and quite frankly when I joined 10 years ago, it probably felt like, from a systems point of view, we were a bit in the 1970s. Everything was PowerPoint and Excel. I’m sure some people can relate, but we’ve really been on an accelerated digital journey because we set ourselves a vision to become one of the world’s foremost digital bottlers.
C.F.: I’m sure you started some of this transformation because within the organization, you saw some challenges and big pain points. Can you share a little bit how that journey started?
S.E.: There were quite a few critical pain points. Probably the one big wake up call was our own internal recruiters. We [didn’t have] any real visibility of all these people around the world. We’d grown into Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Indonesia, as well as Northern Europe without any unified digital system. [We used] lots of different systems across the organization.
The recruiters were having to go to LinkedIn to find out information about our people, and then that information wasn’t configured in a way that was useful for us. What were [employee’s] real aspirations? What were their mobility abilities? What were their language skills? We realized we had a problem there that we needed to fix and fix quite quickly, because we’re recruiting and moving and mobilizing our people around the world, and it wasn’t really scalable.
The second critical problem for us was in succession planning. We didn’t have a system for being able to collect information other than picking up the phone saying, “Who do you know?” [It was] not the most inclusive way of looking at all of the talent that we had around the organization. We need a system for this. We couldn’t find something that would fit our needs. We realized we had to partner with someone to build something.
We were delighted that, having built the talent ecosystem with a Career Hub internally with Eightfold, you were willing to listen to our succession problems and help build a system that could work for us but also work for other organizations.
That’s been a real game changer for us. It enabled [us] to build credibility with our board and our executive leadership team because we can present our succession plans in an instant without trying to consolidate a million PowerPoints. And with role-based permissions, we know it’s safe, and we are able to deploy that around the world so that we gather that intelligence of our people going forward.
C.F.: We talked a little bit about agentic AI, and I’m sure you’re grappling with some of the questions internally that I’ve been mentioning. How do you see [agentic AI] impacting your employees and or your organization? How are you supporting them?
S.E.: I think agentic AI is something that we’re curious about. We don’t know what we don’t know, so coming to events like this is fantastic because we’ll learn a huge amount. We are implementing some elements of agentic AI, but with real care. What we’re looking at is what’s the real-world impact? Where is it going to really make a difference for our customers in our supply chain and also for the employee experience?
We’ve set up an AI academy to demystify some of the terminology and hopefully build a bit more understanding and positive awareness of what agentic AI can do for you. We, like a lot of global companies, are trying to be more standardized, trying to make sure we’ve got great workforce design and great shared services. To do that, you also need to look at how you can become more efficient. We think agentic AI has the potential to do that.
We’re going to take it step-by-step and with care because we also believe that we have a strapline in our organization, which is people join for the brands, but they stay for the people. It’s that mix of fantastic technology but with a human touch that we think is really important.
We’re bringing more young people into our business — they are expecting an experience that is slick and not jarring. You’re used to it in your outside world, so when [they] come into your organization, [they] want those systems to work for [them] and to be something where [they] can find things and you’re easy to do business with. We think all those complex, boring tasks are where agentic AI could really make a difference.
Eilfield shares how focusing on skills has helped shift perspectives of what’s possible within CCEP.
C.F.: How’s the academy going? Is it getting good acceptance [in the] early days?
S.E.: It really is. What we set up is subject matter experts internally because you always have those pockets of people who are early adopters. Those [early adopters] are helping reverse mentor some of our people, like me, that need to learn a little bit quicker.
We’re having AI incubators as well where we take a use case, we help people learn how to write a business use case for a particular [agent], and then we test: is it feasible? Is it scalable to the global scale that we have? And does it actually return any of that investment?
C.F.: Let’s talk a little bit about our partnership and maybe the good, the bad, and the ugly in terms of how we’ve supported or accelerated your workforce transformation.
S.E.: We always had a bit of a vision that we wanted to have a digital roadmap from here to 2030 and beyond. Finding that partnership with somebody who’s prepared to listen, not just pump a system at you, has been very, very helpful.
We started with building that talent ecosystem for the Career Hub. Of course, you get some testing problems. It’s always progress over perfection, so [when] you implement a system, you spend a long time building that infrastructure with all of the critical skills and identifying the critical skills.
I think what’s helped is [Eightfold] helped us think about skills in a different way, and the way that being a more skills-based organization can really help. I think we identified the 100 most critical skills and then locked that in with each role to [identify] what the four to five most critical skills are for this role from [those 100]. Helping us with the structuring of all of that, which we didn’t have the experience on, has been a fantastic partnership when we first launched the Career Hub.
Of course, you get some fun testing problems whilst the AI is trying to learn the different rules and the rule bases. You have to warn your workforce sometimes it won’t get it perfect. The nudges it will give you won’t be perfect straight away, but they’ll learn over time. It’s interesting when you get a senior executive saying, “Well, I just got Career Hub nudging me to go and be a customer service rep in Nottingham.” And you go, “Oh, we haven’t quite got the rules right yet.” You learn as you go along that [the AI] is learning, but it’s built with us.
Then leaning in, you’ve been great at saying, “Engage with us. Give us stakeholder feedback.” One of my colleagues spends a lot of time speaking to your team, saying, “We need to just tweak this. We need to change this,” and then we work out together how we make that more and more powerful.
It really has been a journey which has given us the confidence to move to the succession plan module. Now, our next step will be getting into the whole recruitment and candidate management system.
Eilfield shares some of CCEP’s outcomes achieved since launching their Career Hub with Eightfold.
C.F.: What a great journey. By the way, I think netting it to 100 critical skills is a phenomenal outcome. We manage over 1 million skills, but at the end of the day, understanding what really makes sense for you is super. What would you say to the audience that might be considering [their transformation journey]?
S.E.: We did start from a place of being employee-inspired. We listened to our employees to start with. We looked at engagement survey data. We wanted to improve our engagement scores. They were good, strong engagement scores, but there was one particular question that was worrying us: “I feel that CCEP supports my ability to learn and grow.”
Our scores were quite low, and so we first went, “Well, let’s do some focus groups about why.” [We learned] our colleagues were confused about how they navigated their careers. They wanted more support for navigating careers.
Fundamentally, it starts with knowing what you want to achieve. We started with what’s the business problem to solve? How can we solve it? Who are the providers that can solve it, and who’s prepared to partner with us?
We started with a vision of wanting a talent ecosystem, succession planning, and a better recruitment and candidate experience. Then we brought that to [Eightfold], and you partnered with us and actually built upon our strategy, especially around skills-based organizations.
What we’ve learned is since we started in 2021 with our UK business, our engagement scores went up 6%, but our growth scores for that one question have gone up 16 points in that period. People are having more confidence to use the system. We started with 2% of our colleagues having a talent profile or talent card.
We’ve now got 80% adoption, and that’s not been us having to nag people to do it. It’s because the system is slick, it’s user-friendly. It’s designed with the user in mind, and people can use it on their own devices or work devices. What we’re seeing now is cross-functional mobility because of this skills-based approach, which is increasing. We have 2% less turnover, and [employees are] three times more likely to move internally with us.
Altogether, it’s about having that vision of what we wanted, articulating it to you as a partner, and then working with you to say, which module should we go for next? And you’re not pushing us too fast, but you’ve allowed us to go faster than we ever felt we could with more confidence. It’s given us, internally, a lot of credibility, and a sense of confidence of where we’re going forward.
C.F.: What comes next in terms of your evolution of the strategy and the partnership with Eightfold?
S.E.: The next big step will be improving the recruitment modules. With your help, we’re recruiting both internally and externally. We want to make sure that cross-functional ability to move talent is fluid.
Our big focus now is improving that recruitment candidate experience going forward and looking at how we can use agentic AI over time, with care, to become more productive and efficient, but always, as we say, with that human human touch.
Watch the full Q&A from Cultivate ’25, available now on demand.