The design and discovery of porous materials have become a central theme in materials science, driven by their applications in gas storage, separation, carbon capture, and catalysis. Rapid advances in synthetic chemistry, particularly in metal–organic frameworks, porous organic cages, and conjugated microporous polymers, have enabled the generation of increasingly large and diverse material libraries.

The development of automated experimental facilities and the digitization of experimental data have introduced numerous opportunities to radically advance chemical laboratories.

In the past decade, machine learning has emerged as a powerful tool to predict reaction outcomes.

Diverse collections of well-defined glycans are needed to investigate the molecular mechanisms by which these biomolecules mediate biological and disease processes. Several automation approaches have been introduced to accelerate the enzymatic synthesis of complex glycans. These methodologies have, however, provided only relatively simple oligosaccharides due to limitations of glycosyl transferase selectivity.

Pharmaceuticals increasing complexity requires longer synthesis with unique processes for each step, increasing the number of experiments to develop robust sustainable processes. The time to develop these processes is getting shorter, and automation can support the growing need to efficiently perform more experiments.

Advances in high-throughput instrumentation and laboratory automation are revolutionizing materials synthesis by enabling the rapid generation of large libraries of novel materials.

Direct air capture (DAC) of CO2 remains limited by adsorbent performance. Adsorption kinetics are a particularly underexplored lever to improve adsorbents, despite their significance in realistic processes. Today, the profile of 'the' optimal DAC adsorbent displaying high CO2 uptake and selectivity as well as fast sorption kinetics remains unknown.

Covalent organic frameworks (COFs) are versatile materials platforms for precise function integration owing to their high crystallinity, large surface areas, tunable characteristics and diverse and predictable structures. However, the dominant solvothermal method for COF synthesis requires harsh conditions, including high temperatures, toxic organic solvents, sealed and pressurized reactors, and extended reaction times that often exceed several days.

Reversible addition–fragmentation chain transfer(RAFT) polymerization has undergone transformative growth since itsinception in 1998, emerging as a powerful and versatile tool for precision polymer synthesis.

In modern pharmaceutical and bioprocess manufacturing environments, automation alone is no longer enough. True digital transformation requires every instrument, robot, sensor, and workflow to operate with precision, reliability, and complete data integrity.