The Intellegens Customer Advisory Board (CAB) met in June at Hinxton Hall on the Wellcome Genome Campus near Cambridge, a suitably scientific location for a day of strategic discussion on the future of machine learning for chemicals, materials, and life sciences. The Board is a group of key user organisations that provides guidance for Intellegens, ensuring its development plans for the Alchemite™ software and related service offering are well-aligned with strategic customer needs.
Sectors represented at this meeting included:
- Specialty chemicals and materials
- Food and beverage
- Fast-moving consumer goods
- Formulated products
- Life sciences
The meeting began with each customer outlining their work using Alchemite™ and answering some key questions on business and technology trends. Some themes emerged, including:
- the need to overcome risk-aversion around ML with effective deployment, training, and ‘Explainable AI’ tools;
- the need to fit with corporate digitalisation and data security strategies; and
- interest in extending usage to more applications and types of data, such as time series, and to more users through creative licensing options.
These and other issues were explored in more detail in two discussion sessions. One focused on driving adoption of ML with ideas on: successful deployment models; what does, and does not, constitute effective training; and the role of scientific services. The second session identified and explored important industry trends, including:
- the focus on sustainability and other ESG objectives;
- approaches to digitalisation and data storage – for example, potential uses of ML to segregate data so that it can be stored more efficiently; and
- the need for integration with other scientific IT solutions.
The meeting concluded with an update on the current Intellegens Roadmap and an opportunity for CAB members to provide feedback.
Intellegens CEO, Ben Pellegrini, commented – “It was great to get some committed customer organisations together for such in-depth discussions. We heard about some of the ways Alchemite™ is being used to generate insights and focus experimental work but, more importantly, we came away with lots of good ideas for how we can refine our product roadmap and service offering. We look forward to future CAB meetings, and invite other customers interested in participating in such sessions to contact us.”
