IFS Unleashed 2024 - day #1: Industrial AI for assets, workflows, people & services
IFS CEO Mark Moffat kicked off IFS Unleashed 2024 in Orlando this week with a promise to explain how his firm is bringing ‘IFS Industrial AI’ to assets, workflows, people & services.
“We’re not just about ERP services and selling subscription licences and then disappearing for a while, we’re all about being a connected strategic partner with our customers to help them achieve new, bigger and wider business outcomes,” said Moffat.
Urging the audience to embrace the opportunity to work as a community, Moffat pointed to the way the 7000 strong members of the IFS staff (or, team purple as they are known) are working to continue the company’s focus on its six key verticals.
Those verticals are:
- Manufacturing;
- Energy & Utilities;
- Construction & Engineering;
- Service Industries;
- Telco;
- Aerospace & Defence.
In January of 2024, Moffat set out to meet 100 IFS customers in 100 days… an effort he says he made to show the market that the firm insists that it will never be a bloated sluggish technology mover.
Copperleaf asset investment software
Looking at this year’s IFS acquisitions, EmpowerMX (an aviation maintenance company) is one of the key developments… but Copperleaf (story detailed here previously) is probably a higher-profile development.
The company is a specialist in helping firms make the right asset investment decisions – and those decisions could be investing in a whole new airport terminal, or rolling out a bunch of new routers and switches (for example) through some operational network.
Copperleaf software works out how to use limited funding resources to optimise the scale of investment decisions being made in any given scenario.
Moving on to sustainability (and let’s remember that IFS works in aerospace, construction, engineering and manufacturing in particular), CEO Moffat noted the company’s new sustainability module that is designed to help customers reduce carbon emissions in the immediate, medium and long term.
Real world data
“It’s all about working at the point where data meets the real world,” said Moffat. “So now it is our mission to become the world leader in industrial software.”
Switching to a Satya Nadella video recording (because no keynote is complete without a Satya video or a ‘surprise’ appearance from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang) previously recorded with Moffat, Nadella enthused about the IFS-MSFT partnership and also spoke about the drive to digitise an increasing amount of our world around us as we apply new reasoning engines (many with agentic capabilities) to impact the way almost all enterprise software will be built now.
The IFS ESG roadmap is built on Microsoft Azure, so this was a good chance for Nadella to talk about how Redmond works to make sure AI models are deployed safely in environments where customers are able to keep tight control over their own data.
From bots, to agents
Some themes at enterprise technology shows tend to feel like they are being constantly reinvented… and AI is often a key facilitating factor in this progression…
In terms of what Nadella and indeed IFS’s Moffat are most excited about, the pair agreed that workflow components with human interfaces to copilots will be key… they also see many technology companies deploying an increasing amount of AI agents which will work with humans… and in some scenarios, agents will also work with other agents. In fairness, Microsoft said almost exactly the same thing a decade ago when it first got really excited about RPA ‘bots’… so the AI reinvention seen here is perhaps a little inevitable.
Chief product officer at IFS Christian Pedersen took the stage to start driving into a more technical demonstration of what IFS does.
Reminding the audience that AI has been around (in practical application terms) for as long as 30-years, Pedersen said that we’ve come a long way from early AI applications focused on postal mail sorting towards today’s generative AI functions.
Demo diorama
IFS delivered an extended later session of its keynote with a working selection of demos designed to showcase how its platform “connects human beings with backoffice systems” using the IFS Cloud technologies spanning everything from procurement management to manufacturing systems and onwards.
With a constant focus on using these systems to manage an organisation’s eco-footprint in all areas of production (whether the deployment is dedicated to either products or services or both), IFS appears to be crystallising its industrial AI vision into a coherent technology proposition that, if anything, makes it very clear that this is not just an ERP company.
Thinking back to the company’s conferences and newswire streams some half a decade ago, the Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) and Field Service Management (FSM) aspects of the IFS platform were always present too… but perhaps now the whole ecosystem of tools within IFS Cloud now coalesce and appear to make more sense.
IFS CEO Mark Moffat.
