To what extent can synthesis steps be automated? Do you use a computer to plan how to get to a chemical? Do you use robots to carry out some or all steps?
In a usual lab no automation whatsoever. When something goes commercial there are two routes. One is adapting to bigger batches where you will get some automation (dosing, temperatur controll, mixing). The last step is to have full blown process where you pipe stuf from reaction a to b. However, that last one works best with large scale basic chemicals. Think all kinds of polymer materials.
There is a trend to get pharmaceuticals to a stage where flow chemistry can be used (like a small version of the full blown basic chemicals processes). This is however still a research field because a lot of processes don't lend themselves to continue flow.
The most automation in chemistry can be found in the analytical side of things. A good example right now are the covid tests that are run on large automated liquid handling systems.
I asked this question once. I couldn't figure out why there's no SPICE for chemistry (SPICE being any of several accurate, refined, and well-understood simulation programs for EE work).
You know the whole deal with the three-body problem? How closed-form solutions become intractable in a hurry once you go past two or three mutually-influential orbiting bodies? As it was explained to me, that's why there's no SPICE for chemistry. Modeling exactly what happens when complex orbitals with dozens or hundreds of electrons interact with each other is one of those things we just have no clue how to implement in a practical application.
(Quantum) Many body problem is indeed at the very heart of chemistry. If it was solved creation of new materials and chemicals would be less of trial and error.
In principle it comes down to the fact that problem space explodes tensorially with number of electrons e.g. in principle you need grid size of 3N dimensions per every electron so for helium a^6 where a is number of points in the grid (and you probably need at least thousands of tens of thousands to accurately solve differential equations). This can’t be done in practice so other methods (expansion of problem in basis usually) are used.
Unfortunately solving Schrödinger precisely requires incredible amounts of both computing power and theoretical expertise. Qualitative results are up there for most systems thanks to developments in theoretical chemistry but it is still quite manual process that requires expert computational scientist to make sure results are reliable.
I believe I've seen occasional reports on chemistry sims on HN; the last I saw, someone had managed to simulate an "interesting" number of atom at a rate of 1 ns / week.
Excitingly, this is one of the problems that quantum computers will be good at. We might see a time when chemists can run experiments faster on a computer than they can in the lab.
There is a trend to get pharmaceuticals to a stage where flow chemistry can be used (like a small version of the full blown basic chemicals processes). This is however still a research field because a lot of processes don't lend themselves to continue flow.
The most automation in chemistry can be found in the analytical side of things. A good example right now are the covid tests that are run on large automated liquid handling systems.