For stimulating thoughts, consider this:

Industrial coatings & thin film are among the currently produced products with lots of energy storage/harvesting, communication, and attack capability. If u are developing products for your team, then u might need to consider products that go over the top of an adversarial or 3rd party system. There might be Level 1 products that simply neutralize the adversary & Level 2 that utilize it in some way. A decision maker may need to figure out whether to create a new part/wall etc. or coat it with something…

There is, almost literally, an infinite regress of these sorts of considerations even prior to getting into the always advancing tech frontier.

Many, many processes of interest to practical ChemE & Material Science projects involve the time courses & applications of chemical mixtures that harden & set in place with various types of intra-material & extra-material adhesion properties. A lot of empirical work goes into finding exact recipes for mixtures, time courses, application configurations etc. to create an efficient process with a desired result. We intuitively speculate that devops can do a lot to help practical designs by applying frameworks for high-dimensional multi-grid, geometric PDE modeling in ways that allow the chem researcher to set design parameters of “stuff” and geometric/mechanical properties of application. From a software POV we want to combine dynamic geometric CAD with PDE modeling of the hardness, stickiness, vicscosity, etc. of the materials being applied and set. On top of that we want to add ML methods & databases to suggest designs that are likely to yield good results & update the empirical theory as we go, using both simulation & field experiments.