Conference Agenda

• Moving beyond volume-led growth toward higher-value performance
• Scaling innovation through operational discipline and strategic partnerships
• Using AI and data to improve agility, reliability, and margin resilience
• Making circularity commercially viable within existing industrial systems

• How AI is helping move the industry beyond commoditized products toward tailored, high-value customer solutions
• Connecting technical, operational, and market data to create faster insight loops that improve formulation decisions and commercialization speed
• Demonstrating how AI can enhance customer responsiveness, shorten innovation cycles, and drive better performance across industrial applications
• Sharing a CEO perspective on how digital capability, data infrastructure, and applied chemistry together can transform competitive positioning in legacy markets

• The importance of building trust in AI informed by domain expertise
• What science-smart AI looks like when it works
• Demonstration of domain-tuned agentic AI (CAS Newton) on real chemistry problems
• How to enhance AI adoption iteratively within your R&D workforce

• Moving beyond isolated tools to an integrated digital and physical R&D backbone structure - including (lab automation, ELN, pilot, IP, Documentation)
• Empowering cross-disciplinary scientific collaboration while navigating geopolitical, regulatory, and supply chain challenges constraints
• Enhancing data quality and connectivity to accelerate scale-up and decision-making processes
• Strengthening organizational resilience and long-term competitiveness in an increasingly fragmented global landscape and promoting collaboration

• Powering the lab of the future: clean master data fuels AI, automation, and digital twins—cutting R&D cycles by up to 40%
• Accelerating smarter innovation: standardized data enables faster, compliant, and more sustainable product development
• Unlocking PLM performance: a single source of truth drives 2–3x faster molecule-to-market and eliminates costly rework
• Learning from the leaders: real-world lessons from Huntsman on building a scalable molecular data foundation

• Balancing safety with innovation: leveraging existing technologies and introducing new ones, while ensuring process safety and regulatory compliance
• Justifying upfront costs against long-term gains: balancing high capital investment opportunities with potential future efficiency, resilience, and ROI
• Maintaining operations while accelerating change: enhancing current infrastructure without disrupting continuous production capabilities
• Bridging workforce gaps: retaining legacy expertise while building digital and automation capabilities, and engaging, connecting, and informing teams in the spirit of transparency and empowerment

• Integrating generative AI into existing R&D workflows to accelerate qualitative insight generation and strategic decision-making
• Mapping researcher pain points and align AI tools to high-impact use cases that enhance innovation productivity
• Driving adoption through real-world examples, user feedback loops, and leadership-backed incentives
• Enabling AI fluency within teams to unlock continuous improvement and spark AI-first redesign of R&D processes

• Embedding AI into plant operations to reduce variability, improve yields, and drive margin expansion across existing assets
• Deploying AI copilots and closed-loop control systems to enhance operator decision-making, execution consistency, and plant reliability
• Delivering improvements in energy efficiency, emissions, and asset utilization without major capital investment
• Scaling from pilot use cases to enterprise-wide adoption across sites, ensuring consistent performance and measurable business impact

• Spotting early innovation signals in materials and processes before they reach the market
• Investing in R&D with confidence using invention data to stay ahead of competitors
• Identifying emerging technologies in the chemical industry that will shape the next decade

• Forging strategic alliances that expand technical capability, share risk, and compress commercialization timelines
• Deploying modular, flexible unit operations to accelerate pilot-to-demonstration-to-market scale-up
• Implementing data-driven, accelerated development methodologies to reduce cycle time and de-risk specialty chemical applications
• Capturing high-value re-shoring opportunities through scalable, capital-efficient process platforms

• Shifting R&D investment toward specialty, high-value, and application-driven chemistries
• Deciding when to pause, pivot, or kill projects during economic uncertainty
• Using data and market signals to guide innovation capital allocation
• Managing executive expectations around R&D ROI and time horizons

In this interactive session, delegates will choose a roundtable to join. The roundtable will begin with a short and informal introduction by the roundtable host, followed by a facilitated discussion between all participants at the table. This is an opportunity to delve deeper into your chosen topic, and meet, network with, and exchange ideas with likeminded participants.

• Turning sustainability into measurable outcomes, from cost reduction to new product margins
• Defining innovation and tracking the right metrics to link R&D to business value
• Deploying innovation as a tool to decouple growth from emissions without sacrificing performance
• Scaling sustainable solutions across sites and business units for repeatable impact

• Turning regulatory pressure and sustainability demands into drivers of resilient, market-relevant innovation.
• Combining global R&D capabilities with deep regional customer proximity to accelerate adoption in volatile markets.
• Breaking silos through cross-regional teams, data-driven decisions, and sprint-based development.
• Leveraging strategic partnerships across the value chain because innovation is a team sport.

• Is the “green wave” recalibrating?
• Decarbonisation and margin pressure
• When customers won’t pay a premium
• Making sustainability investable and defensible

• Re-designing chemistries and processes to accommodate multiple regional feedstocks without sacrificing product performance or quality
• Building feedstock-agnostic process platforms amid geopolitical and logistics volatility
• Co-owning scale-up decisions across R&D, manufacturing and supply chain-teams
• Sharing measurable outcomes of a regionalized supply environment

• Managing customers’ simultaneous demands for sustainability improvement and cost control
• Addressing the technical challenge of hard to abate materials
• Showcasing the importance of cross-industry alignment and cooperation on Product Carbon Footprint methodology, and tools to report it efficiently
• Developing a realistic roadmap that balances customer demands for both decarbonization and sustainable content in products, over the short- and long-term

• The Founder’s Lens — Why Market-Based Decarbonization Works: why capital markets — not mandates — are the most scalable, durable driver of industrial decarbonization
• Case Study Deep Dive — Ascend & Heidelberg Materials: two hard-to-abate sectors, two models: offsets enabling a $50M N₂O abatement investment, and parallel development of offset and green cement inset markets driven by corporate demand
• The Offset-to-Inset Evolution — A Capital Markets Framework: using carbon credits to bridge near-term gaps while transitioning to supply-chain decarbonization — maintaining competitiveness without waiting for ideal conditions

• Showcasing the CSF origin story and its evolution within the organization
• Fostering a culture and environment that enables frontline-driven innovation
• Designing and implementing an internal (and alternative) enterprise incubation process
• Identifying and applying the key drivers that accelerate successful commercialization

• Reclaiming space for experimentation - mechanisms for filling the pipeline
• What changed and why ideation is harder in today's operating environment 
• Inspiring innovation culture  – within and beyond the technical community
• Building organizational structure and buy-in for breakthrough bets