The Successful Lab of The Future Requires Digital Transformation

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To meet the demands of accelerated discovery; accurate, reproducible results; and higher throughput, digital transformation is becoming a when, not an if, for chemistry labs. AI is generating exponentially growing volumes of data, robotics implementation is transitioning from “perhaps we’ll have them one day” to day-to-day reality, and all this needs to be managed to meet challenges instead of having it bury the lab.

Cenevo (then Titian Software and Labguru) surveyed more than 155 lab management professionals, who enumerated their major issues as follows:
AI adoption within the R&D process is actually secondary to focusing on the most basic of lab management challenges – inventory management. 65% of respondents said supply and reagent management is the first technology that they want to fully implement.
More than half said that data management and overload was a major issue that needed to be addressed. High-throughput experiments, supplemented with AI, are generating more data than their labs can currently handle.
Smarter, faster science requires increasing automation (77% of respondents) and adopting AI/machine learning (ML) (75%).
Digitization is only somewhat in place. Only 15% are fully digitized, and half still have manual processes. Smaller organizations and academia fall into the early stages, while many of the large pharma/biotech companies are already well into the process.