Stellantis Factory Booster Day 2026: turning plant challenges into shopfloor solutions
Now in its 11th year, Stellantis' Factory Booster Day has grown into a year-round programme that matches real plant problems with AI, robotics and data tools, and feeds proven ideas into the company's production strategy
Stellantis' Factory Booster Day is built on a simple premise: the best manufacturing innovations start with a problem on the shopfloor, not a technology looking for a use. At the 2026 event round table Stellantis leadership team explained how that thinking is shaping everything from agentic AI to cobots, and how it supports the company's plans for faster, more flexible production.
It's more a programme...We try to accelerate it as a sort of hackathon on all the ideas that we can put together in order to fulfil the challenges of the plant
A programme, not a single day
The headline numbers show how the initiative has scaled. More than 60 Stellantis plants submitted over 600 challenges this year, covering needs such as quality, labour cost and energy consumption. Around 120 were selected and put to technology companies worldwide, and more than 80 of those companies, roughly 14 of them startups, were exhibiting solutions at the event.
Chief Manufacturing Officer Francesco Ciancia stressed that the day itself is only the visible part. "It's more a programme," he said. "And we try to accelerate it as a sort of hackathon on all the ideas that we can put together in order to fulfil the challenges of the plant." Earlier in the year Stellantis ran two mini tech fairs, in Detroit and Turin, to extend the reach of the programme across regions.
The aim, according to Ciancia, is not research for its own sake. He described the goal as finding tools that are "not any innovations in sense of research implemented and developed, but innovations that could really give an added value", then working out the right level of industrialisation for each plant's needs.
Tim Fallon, Global Head of the Stellantis Industrial System, said programme’s strength lies in its grounding in real operations. "The power of it is it's solving real-world problems from our plants," he said. Because the whole manufacturing community sees both the challenge and the solution, the event can "spur those ideas of what the possibilities are around our entire manufacturing network."
Anna Valeria Anllo, Head of Innovation for Vehicle Process Engineering, noting her third year working on the programme, said demand keeps rising. "It just keeps getting bigger and better every year," she said, adding that selecting suppliers was "very tough this year" because so many strong solutions were submitted for each challenge.
The process starts at the point of need. "It starts from the shopfloor," he said. "It starts from the issue, the challenges from the shopfloor going into the team leaders, the supervisors
Plant-led innovation inside the industrial system
Booster Day is embedded in how Stellantis runs its plants. Fallon explained that the Stellantis Industrial System includes a function covering AI, data and innovation, so "it's really, truly a part of the industrial system." The process starts at the point of need. "It starts from the shopfloor," he said. "It starts from the issue, the challenges from the shopfloor going into the team leaders, the supervisors."
Pioneers in individual plants feed regional innovation teams, with a global team handling governance, support and strategy alignment. The payoff is scale. Fallon noted that "one of the benefits of being a global operation is the ability to scale and to take innovations across our network."
Ciancia described a matching internal best-practice sharing tool. Plants are encouraged to be "professionally humble" enough to adopt solutions from other regions, with the aim of finding best practice they can "copy and paste" into their own challenges.
From Booster Day to the production line
The clearest evidence of impact comes from Stellantis' Sochaux plant in France, where several Booster Day ideas are now in operation, particularly in its new paintshop. These include Eagle Eye, which originated at Zaragoza and inspects the vehicle exterior after painting, along with underbody checks and automated plug assembly.
Data from Eagle Eye is now sent to an automated cell that reworks defects by sanding and polishing them out. Sochaux's battery shop also uses an underbody workstation presented by a supplier at the 2024 Booster Day in Italy.
This year's showcase continued the theme. Cobots on display are programmed using natural language, which should make it easier to bring more use cases into the plants. A robotic dog is being explored for operations in confined spaces, particularly in stamping plants where scrap evacuation must be checked. Stellantis also presented the final version of a digital twin use case, announced earlier this year with Accenture and NVIDIA, which enters live testing for 16 weeks.
Building safe data foundations for AI
Asked about the data foundations behind factory AI, Ciancia pointed to cybersecurity as a central constraint. Stellantis works on two levels: data processed at the PLC and machine level with maintenance crews, and data processed in a separate safe environment from PLC output.
The company's approach is to pilot AI agents on existing data offline before industrialising anything. "In our pilots we’re looking at how an agent work offline on provided data," he said. The agent is then kept out of the equipment itself, acting as support for the person running the operation. "You can have an agent that is simply supporting the guy that is leading the operation in order to be safe, to process more data, and to make the right decision," he said.
Energy is one example. In a paintshop, ovens need to hold temperature to secure the process, but because vehicle flow is discontinuous, they do not need to hold it constantly. Ciancia said similar approaches apply to logistics and line balancing.
Practical physical AI, not humanoids
Questioned about humanoid robots, Ciancia was pragmatic. Stellantis' priorities are quality, safety, delivery and cost, which call for vision, motion and picking solutions. "If you combine all these things, you don't need to use humanoid [robots]," he said.
He described moving from AGVs following magnetic tape to AMRs that travel between two points autonomously. Adding a cobot creates "a cobot on wheels" and, with camera vision, can improve quality. Bin picking, where parts are taken from a rack without a fixed position, is being studied. The result is that "you can automate what is very low level for humans, and then automatically you improve ergonomics, you improve quality because you have stabilised the process."
Humanoids may have a place elsewhere, but not yet in Stellantis' plants. "In a dark factory, probably new greenfield. But it's not our case," Ciancia said, noting that most Western manufacturers work with brownfield sites. "We have to act with our brownfield [factories], and we have to interact with our process respecting our workers."
The technology has caught up to what they're looking for...The plants are asking for automation. They're asking for creative ways to solve that
Bringing people with the technology
Fallon said operator involvement starts early. "It starts at the operator level," he said. During pilots and proofs of concept, Stellantis brings in the operators who will use the technology, often in a lab or offline cell, so the solution addresses the problem they want solved.
Training follows a standard model through what Fallon called "a very rigorous and disciplined academy system", covering blue-collar and white-collar employees, with AI and vision among current topics. The aim, he said, is to ensure people are comfortable with what is coming into the plants.
How the challenges are changing
Year on year, the core themes, such as quality, remain stable, but the tools have improved. "The technology has caught up to what they're looking for," said Anllo, noting an increase in AI and physical AI requests. "The plants are asking for automation. They're asking for creative ways to solve that."
Fallon said plant and process engineering teams now see the potential of their data, framing the question as "how do we utilise our data to make more efficient decisions and make the correct decisions faster?"
Ciancia described a shift in the manufacturing community's role. "We have many challenges and we have a lot of opportunities outside," he said, so the task is to be "smart" and "very well integrated" in choosing what fits.
Supporting new launches and global partnerships
Booster Day findings are also meant to shape new projects. Ciancia called Zaragoza "a key point in our fast lane", saying mature practices should become "a sort of standard" in the early phase of new launches rather than being introduced reactively.
On China, he was candid that Chinese companies move very fast in these areas. His response is collaboration. "I would not go in a sort of competition with someone that it is stronger than us," he said. "I would look to a more collaborative approach." Stellantis has hosted Chinese suppliers at a European mini tech fair and already has initiatives running in plants. Ciancia added that opportunities also come from Silicon Valley, Central Europe, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. His message was open but selective: "Chinese are welcome."
Looking ahead, Ciancia said the plan is for Booster Day to rotate between regions while keeping a global view, describing it as "a strong accelerator, a good investment for us."
