Booth 2616, Hall B, front of the room. Five days after we told the world her name, Elsie by Tactus met the industry she was built for.
ADLM 2026 ran July 28 to 30 at the Anaheim Convention Center. It was her first public outing and her first commercial introduction: the first time she stood in front of the people who run laboratories for a living, under her own name.
Three days at the booth
We brought two robots to Anaheim. One stood at the front so people could get close and look at the hardware. The other was powered on and moving for the length of the show, smoothly demonstrating how her arms can move and even mirroring the people in front of her: raise your arm and she raised her arm facing you. It was fun to watch people interact with Elsie.
Screens around her ran footage of our robot doing the laboratory work itself, sorting specimen tubes, unloading a coverslipper, loading slide racks, alongside live demonstrations of the orchestration software.
The robot draws people in from the aisle. The conversations about what a robot could do are why they stayed.
Front of Hall B, mid-morning on day two.
Two very different conversations
The clearest thing we carried home from Anaheim is that we were having two separate conversations all week, and both of them mattered.
Laboratory and hospital leaders came to talk about staffing. Not in the abstract, either. They came with vacancy numbers, with shifts they cannot cover, with instruments sitting idle because there is nobody available to load them. For them the question was never whether a humanoid lab assistant is interesting. It was whether she could take a specific workflow off a specific bench, and when.
Instrument manufacturers came to talk about their installed base, and that conversation ran in another direction. Not “does this compete with my instrument” but “could this keep my instrument running more hours a day.” That is the conversation we’ve been having since we started the company.
At an IVD meeting, a good share of floor traffic is always other vendors. We knew that going in. What we did not expect was how quickly those conversations got practical.
Elsie drew a crowd for three straight days.
The story traveled further than the booth
Coverage of Elsie’s debut ran in five languages.
Clinical Lab Products, LabMedica International and Instrument Business Outlook carried her to the laboratory trade audience. Interesting Engineering picked her up for a general technology readership. Outlets in Spain, Germany, France and Turkey ran the story for their local audiences, and one French robotics publication added her to its standing robot directory, which keeps working long after a news cycle ends.
The placement we did not see coming was the Center for Data Innovation, a technology policy think tank in Washington, including her in its data news hotlist. That is a different room entirely, and a useful signal: the staffing problem in clinical labs is starting to register well outside the lab trade press.
What comes next
We are working through the conversations that started in Anaheim, and we are selecting our first launch laboratories now.
Our next show is Pathology Visions, October 16 to 18. That one is in San Diego, which is home turf.
If you met Elsie in Anaheim and want to keep the conversation going, or if you missed her and would like to see her work, get in touch.