Kaynaz Behdin, Senior Vice President of Digital, Data & AI at Stellantis, is redefining how the automotive giant approaches artificial intelligence. In a recent interview, Behdin emphasized that her focus is not on experimentation but on building AI as a disciplined enterprise capability that drives customer satisfaction, value creation, operational performance, and speed.
Stellantis, the multinational automaker behind brands like Jeep, Peugeot, Fiat, and Vauxhall, operates a distributed global environment. Behdin’s strategy relies on a three-layer operating model: translating leadership priorities into a single execution framework, embedding AI and Data Business Hubs directly into functions, and providing global platforms and shared talent pools to industrialize delivery.
AI is already applied across Stellantis’ full value chain, including sales conversion and retention, warranty and quality cost reduction, logistics efficiency, manufacturing uptime, and faster engineering cycles. Key criteria for prioritizing use cases include business ownership, scalability across plants and regions, and strict safety and compliance frameworks.
Behdin identified the main barriers to AI adoption as organizational and human, not technological. To address this, Stellantis runs an AI Academy with persona-based training—from executive coaching to hands-on workshops—to embed AI literacy into daily work. She also highlighted the importance of governance as an accelerator, with risk assessment built across the data-to-AI lifecycle and observability tools tracking what agents and models do.
Looking ahead, Behdin sees generative AI transforming in-vehicle experiences, engineering cycles, operations, and commercial performance. Stellantis has deployed an Agent Gateway—a standardized infrastructure layer for AI agents to interact with enterprise platforms—and is rolling out a system called Metabot inside Microsoft Teams to bring the agent ecosystem to employees’ daily workspace.
Behdin’s three priorities for 2026 are embedding AI into the business, industrializing agentic AI at scale with strong abstraction layers to avoid vendor lock-in, and ensuring value measurement and compliance by design. She concluded: “It’s the year we move from ‘great use cases’ to true AI-first, enterprise-level transformation, with our customers and our people at the centre of everything we do.”
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