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Conversations on Coatings: Exhibiting at the European Coatings Show
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Read about the coatings industry's key priorities: change management, sustainability and regulatory pressures, and driving innovation
Albert Invent recently exhibited at our first conference abroad: the European Coatings Show (ECS). Held in Nuremberg, Germany, ECS is the leading global conference for the coatings industry, with this year’s event hosting over 25,000 attendees. We had a steady stream of visitors to our booth and spoke with chemists, managers, procurement teams, and CTOs about their digital priorities and major challenges facing the industry. Several key themes emerged from these conversations: change management, sustainability and regulatory pressures, and how to drive innovation.
Change management
While most companies already recognize that digitalization and AI are necessary to stay relevant, there is a high barrier to generating data that is structured, or AI-ready. Some chemists are still using paper or Excel, while others are struggling to adapt to new platforms that were supposed to generate mineable data but only complicated their workflows. Meanwhile, leadership may not be aligned on a digital strategy, with some seeing R&D digitalization as an IT initiative while others view it as a core differentiator and business strategy.
Not only is Albert’s platform designed by chemists to be user-friendly, but our team also has the change management expertise to help organizations assess where they are in their digital journey and create a plan – and business case – to achieve their goals. Read about the factors to success in Albert’s implementation across 3,000 Henkel scientists here.
Sustainability and regulatory pressures
Many companies we spoke to recognized that sustainability-driven innovation is crucial to meeting their customers’ needs. In most markets, however, it is not sufficient to offer a product with sustainable advantages – it must also come with high performance and reasonable costs. Companies are experiencing an increasing urgency around responding to regulatory pressures, as well as the need to pivot quickly in the face of raw material discontinuation and tariffs.
Albert Breakthrough, our suite of AI/ML tools, not only helps reduce the number of iterations needed to find raw material replacements but also enables pricing optimization. Visitors to our booth also appreciated how our Worksheet provides real-time feedback on compliance to restricted substance lists.
Driving innovation
At the end of the day, what the community craves is transformative innovation, the kind that demands more than just minor upgrades to existing products. Expanding into new markets requires companies to explore novel formulations in new design spaces, as well as synthesize new raw materials.
Visitors to our booth were thrilled to see Albert Breakthrough in action and witness its ability to tackle these challenges. By combining AI/ML with both empirical data and the chemist’s domain knowledge, Breakthrough can iteratively generate candidate formulations to meet targets – even for high-dimensional optimizations. Breakthrough also enables chemists to predict physical, toxicological, and optical properties of new compounds before synthesizing them.
The advantages in both speed and creativity that AI brings to R&D will enable chemists to leave their mark on the world and empower companies to move beyond incremental progress towards true innovation.
We’d like to thank the ECS organizers for hosting such a tremendous event. We can’t wait to continue connecting with the coatings community at the Eastern Coatings Show and Western Coatings Symposium and Show later this year. In the meantime, Request a Demo to learn more about how Albert can accelerate your coatings R&D!
Albert Invent recently exhibited at our first conference abroad: the European Coatings Show (ECS). Held in Nuremberg, Germany, ECS is the leading global conference for the coatings industry, with this year’s event hosting over 25,000 attendees. We had a steady stream of visitors to our booth and spoke with chemists, managers, procurement teams, and CTOs about their digital priorities and major challenges facing the industry. Several key themes emerged from these conversations: change management, sustainability and regulatory pressures, and how to drive innovation.
Change management
While most companies already recognize that digitalization and AI are necessary to stay relevant, there is a high barrier to generating data that is structured, or AI-ready. Some chemists are still using paper or Excel, while others are struggling to adapt to new platforms that were supposed to generate mineable data but only complicated their workflows. Meanwhile, leadership may not be aligned on a digital strategy, with some seeing R&D digitalization as an IT initiative while others view it as a core differentiator and business strategy.
Not only is Albert’s platform designed by chemists to be user-friendly, but our team also has the change management expertise to help organizations assess where they are in their digital journey and create a plan – and business case – to achieve their goals. Read about the factors to success in Albert’s implementation across 3,000 Henkel scientists here.
Sustainability and regulatory pressures
Many companies we spoke to recognized that sustainability-driven innovation is crucial to meeting their customers’ needs. In most markets, however, it is not sufficient to offer a product with sustainable advantages – it must also come with high performance and reasonable costs. Companies are experiencing an increasing urgency around responding to regulatory pressures, as well as the need to pivot quickly in the face of raw material discontinuation and tariffs.
Albert Breakthrough, our suite of AI/ML tools, not only helps reduce the number of iterations needed to find raw material replacements but also enables pricing optimization. Visitors to our booth also appreciated how our Worksheet provides real-time feedback on compliance to restricted substance lists.
Driving innovation
At the end of the day, what the community craves is transformative innovation, the kind that demands more than just minor upgrades to existing products. Expanding into new markets requires companies to explore novel formulations in new design spaces, as well as synthesize new raw materials.
Visitors to our booth were thrilled to see Albert Breakthrough in action and witness its ability to tackle these challenges. By combining AI/ML with both empirical data and the chemist’s domain knowledge, Breakthrough can iteratively generate candidate formulations to meet targets – even for high-dimensional optimizations. Breakthrough also enables chemists to predict physical, toxicological, and optical properties of new compounds before synthesizing them.
The advantages in both speed and creativity that AI brings to R&D will enable chemists to leave their mark on the world and empower companies to move beyond incremental progress towards true innovation.
We’d like to thank the ECS organizers for hosting such a tremendous event. We can’t wait to continue connecting with the coatings community at the Eastern Coatings Show and Western Coatings Symposium and Show later this year. In the meantime, Request a Demo to learn more about how Albert can accelerate your coatings R&D!