Future Labs Live 2024 in Basel

The Future Labs Live 2024 congress, which took place in Basel from June 26 to 27, was a great success.

It was a special pleasure and a great honor for me to open and inspire the event with the keynote "Perfecting labs with AI and IoT". The opportunities offered by generative AI in particular are enormous, but the dangers and limitations must not be underestimated or neglected. However, Pandora's box of AI has already been opened, so it is no longer a question of whether generative AI should be used, but only how.

If you ask different steakholders, the requirements for perfect laboratories are answered very differently: 

Management attaches great importance to protecting the investment, future viability and competitiveness, while researchers place particular value on an inspiring and safe environment that can be easily adapted to individual needs and allows them to work efficiently. In order to be able to operate the different, complex systems continuously, operation and maintenance attaches particular importance to an infrastructure that is as standardized as possible, can be easily adapted to changes in use and enables proactive, safe operation through automatic information and notifications. And finally, for real estate management and sustainability, issues such as optimal use of space and equipment with minimal energy consumption are of particular importance.

A common prerequisite for meeting all of these requirements is the collection of various data using IoT and other sensors and the processing of this data with the help of digital assistants. Generative AI will play a special role here, as the automatic analysis of large volumes of data enables significantly more efficient operation.

In summer 2024, Siemens will present the Industrial Co-Pilot, the first generative AI product for engineering in an industrial environment, and this technology is certain to enrich the laboratory infrastructure in the near future.

In addition to digital assistants, the perfect laboratory requires a rethink of technical concepts and requires a design with a high degree of modularization and standardization. Industrial prefabrication means that laboratories can not only be realized much more flexibly, but also faster and with better installation quality.

The fact that these concepts for the perfect laboratory are not just a dream but already a reality was demonstrated live at the event with the Smart Lab Ecosystem. Various case studies in the Smart Lab Facility Track also showed the advantages of this modular system in practical use.