LRIG Bay Area Fall Seminar and Exhibition 2026
South San Francisco Conference Center, South San Francisco, California
The Scientist Holds the Question, Not the Pipette: AI Agents and Robotic Labs in Practice
Carmen Kivisild spoke at the LRIG Bay Area fall seminar on connecting AI agents to robotic and cloud labs, with the time and cost measured against the traditional path.
LRIG, the Laboratory Robotics Interest Group, is a volunteer-run community for people who automate laboratory work. The Bay Area chapter's fall seminar is its largest meeting of the year, drawing scientists from pharma, drug discovery, diagnostics and lab informatics alongside an exhibition floor of laboratory instrumentation. The 2026 programme was the third consecutive year built around AI, and the chapter funded the day through its exhibition, which kept attendance free.
The day
The seminar ran on 15 October 2026 from 11:00 to 16:00 Pacific at the South San Francisco Conference Center, with exhibits, lunch and an afternoon of talks.
The talk
For fifty years the tools of biology raced ahead while the bench stayed the same: a person, a pipette, one experiment at a time. The talk argued that this is now changing, and worked through what it takes for one domain scientist to cover ground that used to need a computational biologist, an assay developer and a QC specialist between them. Describe an experiment in plain English, gather the relevant data, run the calculations, and produce an executable protocol matched to whichever lab is best equipped to run it, robotic, cloud, human or a mix. Results return with full provenance and sharpen the next round.
The argument was that as the price of an experiment falls toward reagents and automation, small teams start doing big science.