At the end of February, ScreamingBox CEO Dave Erickson attended The Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening (SLAS) exposition in San Diego. The SLAS2023 is an international professional society of academic, industry and government researchers as well as developers and providers of laboratory automation technology and tools.
ScreamingBox has a history of working with life science companies, and Dave attended the show to connect with partners, clients and potential clients.
It was very interesting to see that this was a significant trade show, with hundreds of booths and thousands of attendees crowding the isles. Even though the industry of Laboratory equipment might seem narrow and small, it has quite a lot of energy in it. We got lots of leads for software development, but also many of the attending companies were robotics and automation companies with hardware and firmware needs as well.
Laboratory equipment generates a lot of data about the experiments that they run, and there are many companies with software products that collect, process and organize the data from the many systems in a laboratory. Robotics play a major role in laboratories, and these sophisticated systems rely on a lot of sophisticated firmware and software to run and coordinate the systems.
AI is starting to also take off in the Laboratory industry, allowing companies and scientists to process the experiment data, and extrapolate out all the different experiment options, variations and possibilities. It will be very interesting to see how AI will be shaping this industry in the near future.