Waters debuts Peak Integration AI in Empower, cutting manual work 95%

Waters is positioning Peak Integration as a rare AI application in quality assurance and quality control, an area where, as CIO Brook Colangelo puts it, many pharma and life sciences companies have talked a lot about AI "but not in this area." The feature arrives after about one-and-a-half years of work with an undisclosed top-ten pharmaceutical company, much of that time spent on legal agreements and safe data-exchange processes rather than model training. David Leitham, who leads Waters' informatics software business, says once a novel model was ready, development "went pretty quickly from there."

The launch is the second major AI feature for Empower, following an AI/ML anomaly detection tool that debuted in February 2025, and the second major AI announcement from Waters in October, after AI Link brought Anthropic's Model Context Protocol to its informatics platform. Colangelo acknowledges Waters has been "less vocal than some of our competitors" about its AI work.

The broader context is a drug-development process described as a $2 trillion, 10-year path to approval, with pharmaceutical giants announcing partnerships involving Nvidia and Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk and OpenAI, and Merck and Alphabet's Google Cloud among more than three dozen pacts in 2026. Waters is also integrating a biosciences and diagnostics business bought from Becton Dickinson for $18.8 billion, a deal that more than doubled its size; Colangelo says the unit had 8,500 IT employees but only around 20 joined Waters, and he intends to use AI to generate efficiencies rather than double the IT team.