The Second Annual Autonomous Workflows Workshop will be held Wednesday, July 29 – Thursday, July 30, 2026, at The Westin Arlington in Arlington, Virginia.

Autonomous laboratories are moving from promising demonstrations to measurable scientific impact. Recent deployments have shown that autonomous experimentation can dramatically reduce time-to-result, improve reproducibility, enable rapid exploration of complex parameter spaces, and even surface scientific insights that traditional workflows miss. Realizing this potential at scale, however, requires a coordinated effort across the research community to build the software foundations, interfaces, and infrastructure that autonomous science demands.

Building on the outcomes of the first Autonomous Workflows workshop, this second workshop convenes researchers, facility operators, and technology developers to chart a practical path toward making autonomous laboratories a reality over the next several years. The program combines talks with focused discussion sessions aimed at prioritizing community needs, with an emphasis on software: orchestration and workflow systems, instrument interfaces and interoperability, data capture and management, and the integration of Artificial Intelligence-driven decision-making into experimental loops. Hardware needs that enable or constrain these capabilities are also in scope.

A central goal of the workshop is to refine a community roadmap. Through structured discussion, participants will ground the roadmap in real deployment experience, identify gaps and dependencies, and converge on a prioritized set of needs and milestones. The finalized roadmap will serve as a shared reference for the community and a foundation for coordinated investment in autonomous laboratory capabilities across scientific domains.