BEVERLY, Mass. & NEW YORK — HighRes, Inc. and Opentrons Labworks, Inc. have announced a strategic partnership to co-develop the industry’s first AI agent-to-agent laboratory automation workflow. The collaboration brings together HighRes’ Cellario orchestration software and FlexPod automation platform with Opentrons’ Flex® robotic systems and OpentronsAI, aiming to create a new model for how laboratories scale automation using AI-driven systems.
“This is a joint effort to rethink how automation actually gets used in real labs,” said James Atwood, CEO of Opentrons. “With HighRes, we’re creating a tightly integrated system where AI-driven intent is translated directly into reliable, physical execution at the bench.”
“We see Opentrons as an innovative partner that has driven democratization of lab automation through cost-effective, capable liquid handling and more accessible, agentic protocol creation,” said Ira Hoffman, CEO of HighRes. “We share that philosophy, and together we’re unlocking greater speed and access for scientists while maintaining the reliability and repeatability life science organizations demand.”
At SLAS 2026, the companies will debut a live demonstration of the agent-to-agent workflow, featuring autonomous software agents communicating across platforms to generate and execute qPCR workflows from natural-language input. The demo will highlight real-time orchestration, integrated planning and data management, and an AI-ready operational model that unifies lab systems under a shared orchestration layer.
The goal of the partnership is to make it easier for labs to adopt and scale automation without complex engineering or fragmented systems. By combining intuitive robotics with advanced orchestration software, HighRes and Opentrons aim to streamline the path from experiment design to execution and improve how researchers interact with automation in everyday workflows.
