And 74% of your competitors will be unable to answer the one question that decides shortlists: why should we choose you?
That is not a speculation. That is what our survey of SLAS 2026 exhibitors found. And it replicates, almost exactly, what we uncovered at ELRIG Drug Discovery 2025 in Liverpool last October. Different event, different continent, same diagnosis.
The problem is not attendance. It is the absence of a commercial system.
Ninety-eight per cent of exhibitors at both SLAS and ELRIG said they attend to meet new customers. That number is nearly meaningless. The goal is universal. The preparation is not.
At SLAS, 63% named brand awareness as their primary commercial challenge - a shift from ELRIG, where lead generation and customer acquisition led the field. The reasons are partly structural; SLAS lands in Q1, when pipelines are being built and positioning matters most. But the underlying problem holds across both events: challenges are interconnected and full-funnel. Fixing awareness without fixing conversion mechanics is half a job.
Most booths are designed for presence, not conversion. The strategy stops at "be there."
That is not a strategy. That is a gamble dressed up as a plan.
When a buyer asks why should we choose you? what does your team say?
At SLAS, 48% of exhibitors fall back on generic talking points - up from 38% at ELRIG. More exhibitors are improvising than before. Head-to-head battle cards nearly doubled, from 14% to 24%. That sounds encouraging until you read it the other way: 76% of the sector cannot answer the question that determines who makes the shortlist.
This is not a training problem. It is a preparation culture problem.
If your team cannot answer the comparison question with clarity, you are disqualified before follow-up begins. The deal does not go to a better product. It goes to the team that arrived prepared. Confidence without substance is visible. Buyers notice. And they move on.
The firms that win at conferences build the infrastructure before the event. Not during it. Not after.
The AI data from SLAS is where the picture becomes strategically decisive. Power users nearly tripled between ELRIG and SLAS - from 6.6% to 18.6%. Regular users dropped from 37% to 30%. The middle is hollowing out.
A bifurcation is emerging. The top is pulling away while the rest stall.
Until you connect AI maturity to revenue mechanics, this remains analysis rather than strategy. So here it is: power users are not simply generating content faster. They are conducting sharper pre-event account research. They are building personalised follow-up sequences at scale. They are moving from the first conversation to a qualified opportunity in less time. The AI maturity gap is translating directly into speed-to-pipeline and deal velocity. Organisations that close that gap now will compound the advantage. Those that do not will find the cost of catch-up rising faster than they expect.
Organisational AI maturity did improve - average score of 3.12 at SLAS versus 2.80 at ELRIG, an 11% gain. More teams have crossed from exploration into execution. But 30% of exhibitors remain in unstructured exploration mode. That remains the single largest cohort.
Access without structure fails. Every time.
One pattern is worth naming directly: even in organisations with no formal AI programme, individuals are experimenting personally. Grassroots adoption is outpacing corporate permission. That is not an enthusiasm story. That is a governance failure. And it is expensive - in inconsistency, compliance risk, and missed compounding advantage.
Perhaps the most commercially significant finding in the entire dataset: 62% of SLAS exhibitors have never asked an AI to recommend companies in their category.
Buyers who cannot find you in AI results never reach you to complain. You do not lose the deal. You never enter the consideration set.
This is invisible demand leakage. It is operating right now, quietly, while teams optimise for search rankings built for a different era. Of those who did test their AI discoverability, 75% found themselves listed. The good news exists. But you cannot benefit from a result you have not checked, and you cannot defend a position you do not know you are losing.
There is another way to compete - and it does not start with a search ranking. It starts on the floor. The exhibitors who break through are not necessarily the best-optimised online. They are the ones that create an experience so distinctive, so genuinely useful, that buyers remember the conversation long after the badge scanner is packed away. Not the biggest stand. Not the loudest demo. The clearest value, delivered in a way that feels personal rather than performed.
That kind of experience does not happen by accident. It is designed as deliberately as your CRM workflows and your AI prompts. The firms that treat the conference floor as a system - not a stage - are the ones that generate the kind of word-of-mouth and direct outreach no algorithm controls. It generates the word-of-mouth and the direct outreach that no algorithm controls.
AI discoverability matters. But reputation - built one remarkable conversation at a time - is still the most durable commercial asset in this sector.
The competitive window on both fronts is open. It will not stay that way.
Data quality sits at 44% as a reported barrier - unchanged across both surveys. That is the structural ceiling for AI adoption in life sciences, and it will not shift until organisations treat their CRM and contact data as a commercial asset rather than a sales admin problem. Tool overload nearly doubled from ELRIG to SLAS, from 13% to 24%. Vendors are adding complexity faster than organisations can absorb it. Unclear ROI rose from 11% to 17%, reflecting a simple truth: as investment grows, justification pressure grows with it.
Budget, by contrast, barely registers. The sector is not short of will or resource. It is short of structure.
There is a counter-argument worth naming and dismissing. SLAS skews towards automation and instruments companies for whom product demonstrations carry weight. Timing always shapes data. But the structural patterns - preparation gaps, AI fragmentation, post-event follow-up failure - have now replicated across two events, two regions, and two different market moments. These are not SLAS quirks. They are habits we are seeing consistently across the sector, made by default rather than by design.
86 per cent of SLAS exhibitors believe a new buyer can understand their value proposition within 60 seconds of landing on their website. When contrasted with the fact that nearly half walk the floor with generic talking points and no battle cards, that confidence is not competence. It is wishful thinking made visible.
The sector is not passive out of laziness. It is passive because the path of least resistance - book the stand, ship the banner, hope for badge scans - has always produced enough to justify the spend. That calculus is changing. Buyers complete more than 70% of their journey before speaking to a rep. AI is mediating the early stages of research. Physical events are becoming rarer high-stakes moments, not routine pipeline builders. The cost of showing up unprepared is rising, even when it is not yet visible on the dashboard.
The firms that win in 2026 will not simply adopt AI faster. They will build a commercial system that connects AI capability to conference execution - sharper ICP clarity before events, stronger competitive positioning on the floor, faster and more personalised follow-up after it. That system does not emerge by accident. It is designed, tested, and iterated.
Most exhibitors are renting space. The best ones are running a commercial system.
Which are you?