IFS validates applied Industrial AI platform with real-world impact showcase

IFS CEO: Contextual industry-specific AI 

“The opportunity to drive growth in our economy, as well as positively impact our society and planet using AI is now – but importantly, what will make a difference is applying AI in the industrial setting,” said Mark Moffat, CEO of IFS, speaking in New York this week. “The news headlines to date have been on the generic productivity benefits AI can provide to office-based workers, but IFS is uniquely positioned to deliver contextual and industry-specific AI to workers in the field. That is where we will see the most impactful innovation and efficiency gains.”

IFS showcased partnerships with organisations that included work on frontier AI models.

What is a frontier model?

NOTE: As an aide-mémoire, frontier models are advanced, large-scale, general-purpose machine learning systems capable of complex reasoning, generative coding and creative generation across general-purpose diverse domains and are capable of simultaneously processing multi-modal data types i.e. text, images, audio and video.

We’re moving beyond brochures and flyers and planning materials into an era of ‘applied AI’ (something that my son likes to refer to as IRL – in real life) as we now deliver this new era that sees us rebuilding the industrial world and its supply chains with new datacenters (some $7 trillion has been committed globally to AI compute) and infrastructure which will result in a global growth of GDP by +1%… but there’s a gap (that we will now fill) and noone in our view is building the controls and intelligence layers in this space like IFS,” said Moffat. 

From mission-critical to life-critical

Referring to the decades of operational data that IFS has the ability to draw upon, Moffat says that his team knows how operations in the physical world work. But now it’s all about “flipping the switch” and moving traditional mission-critical operations from the industrial world to the era of cloud-native is a big task; otherwise, the mission-critical becomes the life-critical.

“Industrial AI applied is all about putting engines of progress directly into the flow of work so that we can achieve breakthrough results. We are working with world class infrastructure partners to enable business reinvention that is capable of working in this new world of services,” said Moffat. “At the centre of all this is IFS, with our experience of working in asset-intensive and capital-intensive markets to enable the era of applied industrial AI.”

Referring to major partner news announced during IFS Industrial X Unleashed, Moffat noted new working unions with Anthropic, Boston Dynamics and Siemens 

• IFS Nexus Black and Anthropic announced a partnership to accelerate AI. IFS is launching Resolve a new IFS service puts industry-specific AI directly into the hands of frontline workers to transform work. Resolve enables users to predict and prevent faults faster by interpreting multi-modal data such as video, audio, temperature and pressure and complex schematics. 

• Uniting Boston Dynamics’ autonomous inspection robots with IFS.ai creates an agentic AI system that connects sensing, predictive decision-making and action in the field to fill the need for technology that can supplement field workers.

• A new partnership with Siemens is designed to deliver integrated, AI-driven technologies to change how energy, utilities and infrastructure operators plan, manage, and service critical grid assets. The collaboration unites Siemens’ domain expertise in grid planning, electrification, and smart infrastructure with IFS’s market-leading capabilities in enterprise asset management, field service management and AI-powered scheduling optimisation.

Customer use cases

The scenario was demonstrated through a real-world use case at William Grant & Sons, the world’s largest independent distiller. The company worked with IFS Nexus Black and Anthropic to forward-deploy a field-worker productivity service. This helps engineers anticipate and resolve maintenance issues before downtime occurs, improving asset reliability and reducing unplanned outages.

A collaboration with Boston Dynamics was used to demonstrate how physical AI and robotics can use IFS’s industrial AI within a utility setting. Customer Eversource, New England’s largest energy delivery company, spoke to the scenarios being planned to improve efficiency and service to the 4.4million homes it serves.

In addition, IFS’s partnership with robotics manufacturer 1X Technologies was announced, opening the opportunity for 1X Technologies to take their humanoid robots into industrial settings.

Grid & power

A partnership with Siemens Grid Software was announced, using IFS.ai to re-architect tomorrow’s intelligent autonomous grid through asset investment planning and grid infrastructure upgrades.

Always ready to bounce enthusiasm into an enterprise software scenario, R “Ray” Wang of Constellation Research says that we are “finally witnessing leadership” in the category of industrial AI, speaking to the work that IFS has carried out.

“While frontier AI models and infrastructure platforms grab headlines, the critical missing piece has been the orchestration layer, the industrial operating system that embeds AI directly into mission-critical workflows,” said Wang. “Customers seek deep domain expertise from their trusted AI partners, especially in manufacturing, utilities, aerospace, and energy. The AI age isn’t about adding AI features to legacy software; it’s about architecting the control plane for the next generation of intelligent industrial operations where autonomous execution happens at scale, in real-time and achieving decision velocity for tangible business outcomes.”

Extended guest speakers at this show included Mohamed Kande, PwC; Prasad Satyavolu, Accenture; Garvan Doyle, Anthropic; Dr. Merry Frayne, Boston Dynamics;  Ranjit Bawa, Deloitte and Darryl Willis, Microsoft.

Hey, today, let’s get ERP!

Talking about the real applied application point of agentic AI today inside businesses, Vaibs Kumar, senior vice president of technology at IFS said that there are agents that organisations can apply inside their organisations that improve decision making and provide strength and compliance.

“We work with organisations across mega projects that deliver complex assets and integrate with manufacturing projects that oversee field service to businesses. But we know that customers don’t wake up on a Monday morning wanting to buy ERP software, they want systems that work and generate value and can help with demand forecasts and oversee active maintenance,” said Kumar, with another nod to the focus on real world applied industrial AI that IFS clearly wanted to showcase during this event. 

Dan Matthews, IFS chief technology officer rounded out the initial part of this event’s keynote. Engaging in a working demonstration of IFS in action, Matthews and team showed how “agentic colleagues” are now able to work alongside humans in the workplace and, crucially, they do not experience the fatigue factors that humans do (so they can catch key maintenance alerts and so on) as we build the new industrial AI workplace that IFS CEO Moffat has described throughout.

Human-in-the-loop, a bit

Where we get to next with these technologies is a question of how humans start to create real-world workflow systems that incorporate agentic services that stem from industrial AI. Yes, there will still be a degree of human-in-the-loop interaction points into the mix, but how we add and monitor the skills that the digital workers take over may well be the most interesting factor.

IFS clearly has plenty of opinions on how the dynamic should work in the factory and workplace of the future, let’s hope there’s still time for tea break and a few sandwiches.

Mark Moffat, CEO of IFS.

Dan Matthews, IFS chief technology officer.