Bristol Myers Squibb Massachusetts plant wins global innovation recognition from World Economic Forum

Bristol Myers Squibb’s Devens, Massachusetts, campus became the only U.S. manufacturer recognized this year by the World Economic Forum for industrial innovation, a notable outlier in a sector still struggling to turn factory-floor AI talk into hard output gains.

The 89-acre site northwest of Boston specializes in complex biologics and cell therapies built from living cells, work that the World Economic Forum said pushed the company to merge biopharma science with AI and digital strategy in more than 30 new use cases. The result was not just a pilot program or a single automation project, but a broad manufacturing overhaul spanning production, materials and energy use.

The forum said the Devens deployment of IIoT, generative AI, machine learning and digital twin technologies reduced lead times by 40%, raw material costs by 20%, defects by 71% and energy consumption by 31%, while improving on-time delivery in full by 34%. Those gains helped earn the site a place in the Global Lighthouse Network, which added 23 new sites on Jan. 15 and now includes more than 220 sites across more than 30 countries.

For Bristol Myers Squibb, Devens has become a central manufacturing asset. The company says the campus employs about 1,700 people and supports process development, clinical manufacturing and commercial manufacturing for biologics and cell therapy medicines. Bristol Myers Squibb also says its Massachusetts footprint includes a research center in Cambridge, tying development and production more closely together in one state.

The Devens campus has been expanding for years. In June 2023, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved commercial cell therapy manufacturing at a new 244,000-square-foot facility there, which Bristol Myers Squibb described as its third commercial CAR-T manufacturing facility in the United States and a major expansion of the site. That expansion underscored how the company was preparing the plant not just for volume, but for the precision required by advanced cell therapies.

The World Economic Forum has said the larger lesson for industry is that transformation is moving from isolated pilots to scaled deployment. Devens fits that pattern: a plant built around scientific complexity, then refitted with digital tools that translated into measurable production gains. In a manufacturing economy still full of AI promises, that kind of execution remains the exception, not the rule.