How AI Is Transforming Labs: SLAS 2026 Highlights

SLAS 2026 was a powerful reminder of just how quickly our industry is evolving. With more than 7,500 attendees, over 420 exhibitors—the highest number ever—and the largest exhibition floor space to date, the energy throughout the conference was undeniable.

Reconnecting with so many familiar faces in this community is always a joy, but what stood out even more this year was the influx of new innovators focused on automating and digitizing science and laboratories. The growth of new vendors and fresh ideas signals a real shift in momentum.

For many years, innovation felt incremental, however, over the last few years the pace of change has accelerated dramatically. The advancements in hardware are impressive, but what’s remarkable is the surge of innovation on the digital side.

AI-driven solutions are reducing friction and lowering the barrier to building workflows, methods, and data processes, empowering scientists to accomplish more with less effort and specialized expertise.

Introducing Luma, an operating system for science

This is precisely where the Luma Scientific Intelligence Platform from Dotmatics made a strong impression. Luma is enabling true lab orchestration by acting as the connective hub between the physical, logical, and digital layers of the laboratory. While other orchestration solutions have originated from the physical or hardware scheduling side of the continuum, Luma originated from the digital side where Dotmatics has spent years building out a leading portfolio of data systems and scientific capabilities.

Designed with AI and automation at its core, Luma introduces entirely new paradigms—breaking down historical data silos and challenging the reliance on traditional data and scheduling systems.

And now with agentic AI offered in Agent Luma, teams can generate dashboards, create user experiences, automate workflows, build data pipelines, access real-time analytics, configure business rules, all without a need for writing any code. Agent Luma is trained specifically for the scientific domain, and acts as an AI assistant, allowing interaction with internal and external data sources to answer any questions. Plus, it offers the ability to point Agent Luma to an organization’s own AI playbook strategy.

Luma integrates best-in-class, multimodal capabilities from both the Dotmatics and Siemens portfolios, including Virscidian’s automated chromatogram analysis, which transforms raw data into actionable intelligence without human intervention.

Simultaneously, Luma seamlessly connects other preferred third-party capabilities such as data systems, schedulers, workcells, and instruments while capturing and harmonizing all data together in a FAIR format. As a true enterprise software, Luma can be used within a single laboratory or across an entire global organization to revolutionize the way science happens.

The countdown to SLAS 2027 begins

I leave SLAS 2026 inspired by how far we’ve come. The innovation on display feels genuinely transformative—the kind that can move the needle by accelerating discovery, reducing costs, and helping groundbreaking science reach the market faster than ever before.

I anticipate the innovation leaps will be seismic in the year ahead and I am already looking forward to seeing that on full display next year, in a hopefully slightly warmer, San Diego. Until then, it will be an honor working alongside many of you as we utilize these tools and technologies for cutting-edge science, in hopes of propelling humanity towards a brighter future.

To learn more about how Dotmatics Luma is enabling AI-native science, check out this ebook: “Enabling the Lab in a Loop.”