I think that’s a tale as old as automation. You have the people that buy the automation, and then the people that actually use the automation. And at most companies that don’t have a dedicated automation team (or at least a person who knows what they are doing) the people that buy and the people that use are different.
Management will see these instruments at a conference or LinkedIn or through a sales person, hear a few buzz words and decide that $150k ain’t that bad to dip the company’s feet into automation, afterall, it’s code free, anyone can use it and this will look great at the annual review meeting!
The users in the lab then get insufficient training and/or aren’t given time to sit down and properly write/test/use the instrument and it becomes a $150k paperweight destined to be bought up by Copia Scientific for 1/10 the purchase price, where they sell it at 5X profit to one of us who loves it because X/Y/Z, it’s fit the niche you needed and you got a great discount from the original purchase price.
Unless Tecan has implemented a plain language AI interface, I don’t see how they can create a “code free” automated liquid handler. Unless your task is reagent distribution or something and you want users to write a script per volume they want to distribute (because otherwise you’d make the volume to distribute a variable, which involves code).
Color me jaded and unimpressed.