How Benchling builds agents when the smartest AI isn't smart enough

In October 2025, it launched Benchling AI, an intelligence layer with a chat interface, backed by an agent, that helps scientists find data, design experiments, and write reports. Max Agency Podcast How Benchling builds agents when the smartest AI isn't smart enough James Donner June 11, 2026 4 min Go back to blog Create agents Create agents Share Nicholas Larus-Stone is the Head of AI at Benchling , the R&D data platform that life science companies use to store and manage their experiments, samples, instruments, and analysis.

Agent or tool: Claude
Topic: Research & Data
Reported on: Blog (LangChain)
Added: 2026-11-11

Why it matters

Research is mostly gathering, cleaning and comparing. Handing that groundwork to an agent leaves the person with the part that needs judgment: deciding what the findings mean. It is one of 201 sightings filed under Research & Data on Agent Sightings (number 97 by interest), and one of 213 involving Claude.

How you could try it

Here is a reusable prompt, written by us in our own words, that captures the task. Paste it into Claude or any similar agent and adjust the details to your situation.

I want an agent to take on this workflow, show its working, and wait for approval on anything that changes a system or contacts someone. The tool in the source case was Claude.

Saved

Tip: Start small: run it once on a low-stakes example, read what the agent did, and only then let it run on real work.

Source

Read the original first-hand account on Blog (LangChain): https://langchain.com/blog/benchling-max-agency-podcast. Our summary is a paraphrase; details are in the source.

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