YouSaid · the spoken record

Sajith Wickramasekara

lines on the record: 77
first: 2025-11-13
most recent: 2025-11-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“And for them to have new technology that's pretty easy for them to access, my mom's a chat GPT user. And I'm sure it's sort of Google Search Plus at this point, but That's been like pretty cool too of technology that's so intuitive that I don't have to like go home and be IT support at Christmas”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's been some time. Like, I remember I stopped coding around the time that React started being a thing. I'm dating. I'm dating all the kids listening are going to turn off. And I've tried some of the new a genic coding tools lately. And it's just like on a personal level, fun to just feel like the whimsy of being able to build something very quickly again. So like that, that's pretty cool. That's probably the one I'm most excited about. And then I'm excited for my like.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A personal level, I haven't written a line of code. I had not written a line of code in probably, I'm very embarrassed to say this, maybe eight or nine. It's been.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's still got value sometimes. It's a little bit easy to oversimplify other people's jobs. There's a lot of complexity out there in the world of biotech and pharma. But I'm very optimistic that the sort of tech companies will figure out how to make it work because I think everyone's very excited about AI.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Biopharma, again, for all the things that are difficult with this, is figure out how to be safe. Like the US is still the gold standard for how to deliver medicines safely to people. I think that stuff matters more and more.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Almost these faceless companies rather than the people. I think it's like easy to hate on them and underappreciate. So I think they need to tell their story and go direct. That's one thing. I think on what tech can learn from bio is I think once you start, I think sort of tech has sort of become everything and sort of gone from very ambitions of tech have grown a ton. And I do think like some of these other industries have figured something out when it comes to rigor and validity and accuracy and sort of move fast and break things does work for certain domains. But again, once you get to the point where you want to have credibility with regulators to put things in patience or make a medicine, like that stuff does come to matter.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of heroes journeying into, but I think talking about the patients and scientists though would like change a lot of the public perception of biotech and science. I know people know how hard it is to like make a medicine. I mean, I was, you know, I was just thinking recently like you look at COVID even, like Moderna and Pfizer helped the world, whatever you feel about vaccines, like they played an important part in helping the world reopen and yet Zoom gets more credit in COVID. You have Gilead, who's like, you know, HIV used to be a death sentence in the 1980s, and there was tons of panic and fear about it in the 90s and early 2000s It's like cured HIV. Basically, at this point. And, like, most people have no idea. And so I think because sort of the way they communicate is much more about.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm curious what you thought I was going to say. Most people I don't think could name five scientists or five CEOs of pharma companies, but like we could name every single tech CEO. Everyone knows who you say Sam and it's like first name basis, right? And or Jensen or something like that”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Great, great question. I think the biotech and pharma world can learn something from how tech communicates and tells stories. Like there's the whole go direct wave in tech right now that I really, really resonates with me as a founder. I think biotech and pharma companies need to tell their stories. Like most people.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, like, I was like very, very, very cheap, right? Grad student labor. And like the currency is publishing a paper. And that's how you get more funding to do more things and so forth. Whereas in a company like we have to sell software. And so like actually the most impactful thing has been like really a lot of repetition that in order for us to achieve our mission and to keep delivering great things to our customers, like we have to make money. And a lot of attention has come from like that, the need to do that. And so making sure our scientific teams really understand that the better we do as a business, the more amazing innovation we can bring to our customers. And by the way, if we don't do this, who else is going to do it? Where are the other like next 10 companies building software for science and R&D? They're going to power the next discoveries of these biotech and pharma companies. Like we're like, I think we're the only.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Learn from each other. I actually, and this is going to sound obvious, but I've actually found that the most conflict has been around the like actually like how the mission gets solved, where actually a lot of like coming from the world of science, especially academia, is just a very different incentive structure. And in the world of academia, like your labor is basically free.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is a really hard question. I have serious battle scars of that. We've had to build a very interdisciplinary company to be successful. If I was only hiring software people who knew bio, I would have like exhausted the pool 10 years ago. It just doesn't exist. We have to take the software people, take the science people, make them sit together.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Us about like a meeting they had with the FDA and how they ran a report inside of our deep research tool instead of taking them a day. It took them like five minutes and it was like perfect for them. And like that's the level of closeness we get with our customers.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Productivity. Do clougey things to make it work And so when you go talk to them, the first reaction is like, oh my God, what we do is so unique, and we're such a snowflake, and there's no way. But then you talk to enough customers, and it turns out they almost all want the same thing. I find that having five, ten customers is actually like a pretty representative model for what the entire industry needs. You don't want to get like too overweighted in like one category of medicine or one size or something, but everything we build over time that has been successful is because we found a couple of customers and we got very, very deep with them and we built and built until they were like super happy and then it took off. And like maybe that's like the YC part that's been like programmed into me that I've never gotten out of it, like do things that don't scale. I feel like in a vertical that works 10x better. Even for our new AI tools, we have all of our customers, they're available to all of our customers now. But our team is on daily, weekly calls with five or ten customers to the point of like, we had a customer yesterday, tech.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are just not many. And so you have a very underserved demographic where they're not used to someone coming in sort of asking what they specifically need. They're used to very general purpose horizontal software and trying to like.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I, you know, one of the most interesting things about being in a vertical is you talk to all your customers and they all, because no one, the underserved. They're just, you know, the world of life science software. There aren't, it's not like go to market tools where there's like 10,000 companies.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, like, I still spend, and maybe this is a vertical thing, I probably spend 30, 40, 50% of my time talking to customers still. And I think of myself as like the, I need to go really deeply understand their problems and how they're changing and I need to go bring it back to the company. And like, that's the thing I have to role model so the whole company does it.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“AI to them I think my most trusted algorithm for this is go talk to customers. And all that, I know super obvious, right? But all the times in which I feel like the company has been at its lowest or at its worst, or like I'm feeling at my lowest, it's because I've gotten too far from customers. And like product market fit is this moving target. And sometimes your market changes. Like our market changed of like you had a bunch of biotech companies that were going to take over the world and then like then they weren't.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, isn't AI like a distraction? But like we were actually really fortunate, I think we had good sort of outside the building perspective. Ash was very hands-on keyboard himself. And that's how he got convinced. I think he was like playing with one of the models like during Christmas or something like that. Building for himself. And I think that really, really inspired us. And also we realized if we don't do this for our customers, like who is going to do it? Like, again, it goes back to needing to translate some of these amazing things that come out of Bay Area in Silicon Valley into like useful vertical applications in very complex regulated domains that we felt like were the right people for.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it was controversial, like biotech's been obviously had this kind of dot-com level bust. And so a lot of our team is feeling like, hey, we got to focus on the basics with our customers. The market's tough right now. We have some companies that are laying people off, shutting down.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, like, it's funny, he wrote this, wrote this post of like, I'm quitting my job to do this other thing. And I had a bunch of customers call me and they were like, oh my God, I'm so sorry. Your co-founder quit is everything okay. I was like metaphorically didn't quit, just going, going full time on AI.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Still. Okay, all of us. I, yeah, you know, one of the interesting things is like, I feel like the power of being a co-founder is actually just in moral authority. And I think like this was a pretty controversial decision in our company. And we needed someone who had the right, I guess, willingness to like A, like, I don't need any of my Legos anymore. Anyone else can have them. And like B, if I look stupid, that's okay.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so we have a partnership with Anthropic. I think we feel very, we work with, we use sort of all the foundation model apps capabilities, but we found that there's a strong commitment to science from Anthropic. I mean, Dario is a scientist. And so it's been really, really good mission alignment with them. And I think sort of they've expressed publicly that science is sort of the next frontier after code. And I think for our customers, trust is super, super important. And I think their posture plus their technology has been one that really appeals to them. And so it's one where just to start, like benchling and claude kind of like natively interoperate very well. So if you want to work through benchling in Claude or you want to, it works pretty effectively. So scientists can generate reports, ask questions and things like that from a very simple AI interface that they're used to. And I think it's just like the start with them.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's like when it works, it's magic, and like people need this stuff. And so, like, I don't know if AGI starts, you know, automating ways software engineers or whatnot. Like, what's left? Like, got to make drugs for people.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The failure rate is so bad and like the impact is huge. I think everyone's now seen what GLP ones can do. Everyone saw what COVID vaccines can do. Magic.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think bio is, I don't know, like I sort of wonder why don't more people work in bio problems to be solved. There's an incredible”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These are like roles where these are pursuits where that's a ton of domain knowledge to hold in your head and there's so much specialization. And so the idea that you could be truly standing on the shoulders of giants I think is very appealing of now I've got a scientist and I'm in an early stage biotech and now I can have access to the world's best like clinical design expert or the world's best toxicologist or the best research assistant who can even like read papers better than me to figure things out. Like there's a lot about science that again is so artisanal and inefficient that it seems like a problem that AI is going to be much better at. I think that's one thing. I think the other is like, I mean, it is like”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I go back to that sort of returns to intelligence piece where I think science is a problem that has some shake to it that really benefits from the LLM architecture. Like you just think about the corpus of scientific literature as like this vast pool of unstructured text and like.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It seems obvious, but there's like, it's not for free, like a piece of paper is much easier, and Excel spreadsheet is much easier. But there's a set of people who believe it and a set of people who maybe weren't convinced. But now with like AI, one, I think the benefits are a much more immediately obvious to everyone. And so that's going to be this amazing tailwind to try to like do better here. And I think it will convince a lot of people who might have been skeptics in the past.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The odds of success. So we used to spend the first couple years basically just evangelizing bring science online. It's going to be better. And then spent the next 10 years after that kind of convincing people that structured data mattered. And because that's sort of like the core premise eventually, it's a system of record will help you have like a data model. And every time you do experiments, that data model is getting populated with information. You can ask questions. And there's a set of people who, they got it and they believed.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. I mean, and that is because, like, you could argue it's such a high stakes game of poker for them that the only thing that matters is like, does this drug get to patients and is successful? And they can, you know, pharma has pretty healthy margins. And so like the operational efficiency isn't always going to improve the.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And building Yeah, I don't know if this is a thermofisher and Danaher are like sneaky big companies, and I think people don't always realize that. And they've done it largely by systematization of tools in the physical realm, so like instruments, reagents, services around them and so forth. So I think there's some kind of at least thing that rhymes with building great tools on the digital side. I think just frankly, like looking back, the technology probably hasn't been there. When we started benching in 2012, cloud was like the norm everywhere. But most of life science was like paper on-premise spreadsheets. So like we spent the first couple years as well.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You might be able to transact on it. And like, will people be selling their negative data at some point into some pool that other people can learn from? There's all kinds of crazy stuff I can think of.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very, very few transactions of data. Because no one trusts anyone else's data. You wait till there's a clinical trial and the data is positive and you buy the molecule. But you'd think that you'd see a lot more selling of data before that. But you don't because the data like it's very hard. You don't know what format it's in. Do you trust the way it was created? Like it's just not.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To take that expertise and to be fundamentally better at doing research in early development to make molecules and sort of morphing into a biopharma company, like that seems like one logical path. I think there's a world where and we're experimenting in this space where sort of models can be more effectively distributed to the larger biopharma community. So rather than going and doing BB deals with five companies is actually a little bit more like kind of a traditional software sale where we've actually got a bunch of models in benchling. They're mostly open source, but also we've got Chi and Alphafold things like that. Is there a model where like some of these are like pay-per-use or like fee for service, almost like SAS and the entire biotech companies benefiting from that? And you can build models and like have a scalable business model on the other end. Like I think that'd be really interesting. And then there's going to be like more data transactions, I think, as well. Like data wasn't as interesting for a field that really depends on data as its currency. Like everything is about data on the molecule.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would like it to happen. I think right now for companies, I mean, so one as a toolmaker, I think there should be more tools. Tools are good. I do think with some of these model companies in the bio world, there's going to be interesting question of do they morph into in the fullness of time, morph into their own therapeutics companies with their own pipelines? I think it's It's unlikely, it's possible, but it's unlikely that sort of, hey, they're just going to remain pure model companies who just do deals with pharma where pharma, you know, pays them $100 million up front or something like that. And they have five customers and whatnot. I feel like the sort of model of building is probably commoditizing too fast for that to be attractable business model.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like some of the steps matter more than others, like having the right target or having a great molecule generated, fine, but like there's still many, many years after that that we can compress and shape off. And so right now I would sort of almost argue that we should be thinking about like what's the share of experiments that have been touched by some kind of predictive capability, some kind of simulation or some kind of AI. And I bet that shares like getting higher every day.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“AI discovered. Yeah, I feel like the naysayers kind of have this sort of worldview in mind where it's like, oh, I just type a disease and then I get a molecule out and like. Amazing AI discovered drugs. And this is where I go back to my mental model is like there are so many steps. Those steps are all cumbersome and difficult. And this is a game of like making each single thing better.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Basically. And so we've got some really cool stuff. There are problems that I think are fairly tractable in terms of structure prediction or antibody developability and so forth. So like that's really good. But I would say a lot of work in front of us in terms of models that are sort of more predictive of what happens when you get into patients, for example, and don't get me wrong, like discovery is really important, but there's so many other steps that have to happen after you have a concept molecule. If you're much faster, for example, at making molecules and you have a higher success rate, you still have to come up with a process to manufacture that molecule. And now you have even less time to do so if it's like a byproduct of success. And so how do you optimize manufacturing processes to get a lot of yield, speed, cost out of a molecule?”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like federated learning as well. Eli Willy put out this announcement about a project they have called ToonLab where they're taking their internal models and making them available to the broader scientific ecosystem. So a pharma company is saying, hey, you can use our models, but it's give to get. So we get to train and like it's federated or whatnot so they don't get to see the actual scientific data. But I think like those approaches are like this is the beginning.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's been really cool to see the whole ecosystem of these tools grow a ton. Open source wasn't really a thing in biology before or in science before. And like I think in the last two years, it feels like a thing that's here to stay. It's interesting all these interesting models come out, like the bolts, for example, on the structure prediction side. And I think that's like a really interesting thing that's going to change biology. I think you're seeing new approaches to.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Generation, they can generate data to train their own models at a scale that most biotech startups can't match. So I think while it's early on sort of the agentic how we work side, I think you're going to see very unique models come out of pharma where they're computational scientists are building interesting predictive models that, you know, similar to what's happening in the open source world.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah. There's excitement. Okay. For sure. There is optimism and belief. I think they're pretty pragmatic, though. And I think they're all looking to transform, but they're being methodical. Like I would say most of the large pharma at this point that I've worked with, like, you know, they've got co-pilot and things like that. And they're doing a lot of pilots of different technologies, but I haven't seen their R&D orgs transformed yet. Now, the one place I would say that pharma has really leaned in and has an advantage is they have incredible data generation capabilities. And so many of them can and should be training models.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think in a vertical, I think 90% of the work is actually like translation. It's taking something and making sure scientists trust it. It's the right point in their workflow. It's easy to use. And it's accurate. I think the AI that wins is going to be the one that people actually use.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's kind of how I think about it. Like, I think the chat, and I mean chat metaphorically, like that was the interface that made things really take off in software. And I don't think it's really happened. We haven't figured out what that is in bio yet. Some ideas, but by and large, and I just got back from a month on the road and I was in Boston, London, a bunch of other places that are sort of scientific capitals outside of SF. And like most people aren't really using that much AI and R&D yet. Y'all want to. They're primed to, but there's a lot of concerns about accuracy, IP, security, legal. And I think the farther you go from SF, the larger those concerns get.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think right now when I look at biotech, we are in, so it's absolutely like the right point of like, are scientists going to trust this? And how do we know if it's accurate? Right now, I would say like there's been amazing advances in capabilities that scientists could use in the life sciences from the foundation model labs, from bioAI companies, from everyone. It's really awesome. But I think where we've got GPT, but there's no chat.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Probably. I think the model that's worked there, though, is like kind of the co pilot model. And truthfully, at the end of the day, you probably like, you know, with a radiologist, you probably need a human to be accountable for those decisions. It's not just about the technology. Like someone's got to be there to get sued if something goes wrong.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Taking steps. I don't want to call it incremental because it's not. And so I think if you can kind of get those ingredients take the Waymo approach, which some companies have, that's awesome. But I think for the rest of science, there's a huge opportunity to just make things better one experiment at a time and pick off a lot of low-hanging fruit and see if we can get seven to ten years down to two to three years and a lot fewer specialized roles and a lot cheaper to bring a drug to market. I think actually radiology is like an interesting parallel where I feel like ML people have been saying radiologists are going to go away for 10 years. But I think the model that's working.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, wow, that's so interesting. So, yeah, when I hear sort of AI scientists, I think it definitely evokes the image of a kind of fully AIified design, make, test, analyze, loop. And we'll sit back and let the robots give us drugs I would love for that to happen. And I'm maybe more optimistic on a longer time scale we will get there. I think in the short term, I'm next one to two years, which already feels like an eternity in AI time. I'm a little bit more bullish on sort of the augmentation model. Like I kind of think of it as like a Waymo versus Tesla approach where you can do the Waymo approach to autonomy. You just need a lot of money and a lot of patience. And it's going to take some time. I think the Tesla approach has been a little bit more, I would say.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And so we're working towards a world where there are AI agents that can do all sorts of different tasks in the scientific process, whether it's generating reports and asking questions, or it's even like composing experiments from while you're in the lab with voice and vision and things like that.”
2025-11-13 · No Priors · How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT