Automation has been successfully used in quality control and discovery in the pharmaceutical industry for 30 years, or more. Yet its use in reliably testing chemical and physical properties of lead candidate drugs transitioning from discovery to development is less established. What’s needed in the pre-clinical and early clinical phases is to enhance our automation capability for identifying key property and quality attributes when evaluating development risks. For example, molecular properties like solubility, chemical and physical stability, impurities, and the impact these have on biopharmaceutics are investigated. The advances in drug discovery have led to an array of compounds that range from small molecules to structures like mRNAs and proteins making it even more important to quickly identify key method attributes. While automation is a broad term that includes robotics for sample preparation, it also encompasses knowledge management concepts of data integration, evaluation, and result reporting. The purpose of this symposium will be to explore how we can gain speed and efficiency to assess development risks by using new automation tools and advanced analytical instrumentation.