Industrial X Unleashed Event
IFS made a big splash with their vision for the future of industrial AI at their recent Industrial X Unleashed event in New York City. We were excited to join the event to learn how IFS plans to expand their already rich solution portfolio for manufacturing and industrial environments. The event was packed with vision, full of new announcements, and helped showcase what the industrial AI future holds.
The event was the debut of IFS’ AI strategy which includes TheLoops, an agentic platform for mission-critical operations, acquired earlier this year. But it was much more. IFS shared a comprehensive view of the value that their IFS.ai platform, services, and partners can deliver to their customers. The event and the IFS strategy transcend software to Physical AI, incorporating the world of robotics. IFS generated quite a bit of excitement with the event, and went beyond the normal hype to deliver a view into the future where digital solutions, AI agents, and people work together to drive industrial improvements.
Industrial AI Applied
IFS CEO Mark Moffat kicked things off and shared some key tenets of IFS’ AI approach. One of the key points we took away is that Industrial X is for mission-critical applications where you can’t afford to get it wrong. IFS drew a significant distinction for what’s required in these settings compared to back-office applications. This is what they call Applied AI, which is in context, in reality, auditable, domain aware, works offline, mindful of safety, and keeps people safe doing actual work. The goal, he explains, is to “10x” the workforce with robotics, addressing the industrial skills gap and elevating the humans in the process.
IFS SVP Technology Vaibs Kumar further shared the strategy for industrial settings, sharing three critical challenges that we also find in our research; workforce issues, unplanned outages, and changing supply chains. The solution, he explained, is the autonomous enterprise with agents you can trust. The vision he shared is for digital workers that act on the same data as people, dynamically reason and plan, and bring humans into the loop. This will be delivered through digital worker templates that will come “out of the box’ with an associated outcome and leverage over 50 agentic skills that are already available today. He spearheaded a comprehensive demo to showcase the approach, which we’ll share more about later.
Context Matters
Another area we found alignment with IFS’ messaging was around vertical industry context. AI is a class of very valuable tools. But AI doesn’t create value. The application of AI to solve real-world problems (or gain real-world advantages) in a specific data and industry context is where business value comes to life. Our research and experience show the importance of verticalization for AI. In specific, our Making Manufacturing Analytics and AI Matter report shares that manufacturers want industry- and application-specific AI software.
Mark Moffat echoed the importance to their strategy and the value of taking advantage of decades of operational data and thousands of pretrained workflows for their six core industries. Anthropic Applied AI Lead Garvan Doyle explained this was a key reason for the newly announced partnership with IFS. They wanted a way to leverage their secure, enterprise-grade AI capabilities in factories and plants by tapping into IFS’ expertise for AI for the real world. In his words, it’s easy to simulate digital industries because the data is available, but the real world requires a lot of different data. This is where industry context is critical for manufacturing and industrial industries.
Partners, Partners, Partners!
The event showcased a number of important partners and included announcements about new relationships with:
- Anthropic and their Claude AI Assistant
- Boston Dynamics including their famous Spot robots
- Siemens for their smart grids
- 1X Technologies with their humanoid robot
Physical AI
One of the more unique elements of the event was the seamless inclusion of robotics, or Physical AI, in the AI story. Most AI strategies live fully in the digital realm. Instead, IFS included the physical world in a cohesive strategy. AI obviously plays a big role in robotics, including vision systems and autonomous decision-making, but it’s not often that you see a continuum of action across digital and physical worlds. It’s part of what IFS talks about as the new workforce, which includes human, industrial, and digital as one system. We were treated to some use cases, for example, involving Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot that highlighted how robotic workers can extend human capabilities by working in environments that are harsh or unattractive to human workers.
The Demo that Pulled it Together
It’s uncommon to see a demo that effectively pulls together all the various elements to present an integrated view of the future way of working. IFS pulled this off. They showed an example that connected the AI vision from predicting a maintenance issue, triaging it, optimizing a service schedule, readying materials, servicing the equipment, reporting on the event, and learning from it for future corrective action.
The demo showed the interaction across an integrated workflow focused on maintaining uptime in a factory. It included traditional workers but also a digital colleague, the Digital Triage Worker (a purpose-built AI agent). It was a good view showing how agents can play different roles, at the right time, with the right information. To further the point, they extended the demo to have Spot the robot dog respond to an issue to gather more information before involving a human, saving precious service personnel a trip by gathering more information in advance without the need for human intervention. The scenario is realistic and achievable, and it’s clear how Industrial X would support it.
The Demo that Pulled it Together
It’s uncommon to see a demo that effectively pulls together all the various elements to present an integrated view of the future way of working. IFS pulled this off. They showed an example that connected the AI vision from predicting a maintenance issue, triaging it, optimizing a service schedule, readying materials, servicing the equipment, reporting on the event, and learning from it for future corrective action.
The demo showed the interaction across an integrated workflow focused on maintaining uptime in a factory. It included traditional workers but also a digital colleague, the Digital Triage Worker (a purpose-built AI agent). It was a good view showing how agents can play different roles, at the right time, with the right information. To further the point, they extended the demo to have Spot the robot dog respond to an issue to gather more information before involving a human, saving precious service personnel a trip by gathering more information in advance without the need for human intervention. The scenario is realistic and achievable, and it’s clear how Industrial X would support it.
Helping Make it Happen
Finding the path to value for industrial companies takes guidance. We heard from leaders at both PWC and Accenture sharing their advice. In addition to partners, however, IFS acquired an experienced AI services team. The team, Nexus Black, works directly onsite with customers to help them achieve value. Their approach is to put AI engineers in the field to deliver AI use cases. As CEO, Kriti Sharma explained, they like to get their hands dirty to implement technology to solve real problems.
Nexus Black also espouses a vertically focused approach. The message was “AI for the industries we rely on, built with the workers who run them.’ In addition to an example at a distiller, they shared solutions including Nexus Black for Aerospace to review FAA Airworthiness Directives to determine necessary actions and Nexus Black for Energy to help identify which field assets should be fixed first due to their higher risk of wildfire.
So Much More
There was so much more to this event that we don’t have time to share, including insightful presentations by MIT CISR and IFS customers Noble and Kodiak Gas Services.
Our Take
IFS shared significant progress toward their Industrial AI vision to add new value in addition to their ERP, enterprise asset management (EAM), supply chain, and field service solutions. It was great to see how mobilized they are, how broad their view is, how practical their approach is, and the world-class partnerships they’ve developed to make it happen. There was excitement in the air as IFS showed how Industrial X pulls it all together. We’re looking forward to following progress and speaking with customers who are walking down this path.
Thank You
Thank you, Mark Frampton, for including us, and congratulations to the IFS team and their partners for an impressive event – complete with a billboard! We look forward to following your progress.
