IFS Expertly Blends Innovation And Practicality To Unleash Agentic AI For Industrial Sectors

While the consumer frenzy around GenAI has been running white-hot for three years, adoption by industrial firms has been held back by a cautious approach to bleeding-edge innovation and technical barriers to adoption. To push through these challenges, IFS has developed an industrial AI framework, which it announced at the Industrial X Unleashed event on November 13.

Big picture: IFS has reimagined how it engages customers to help them benefit from AI innovation. This has involved building out a new ecosystem of AI and robotics partners spanning 1X, Anthropic, Boston Dynamics and OpenAI – as well as acquiring AI start-up TheLoops in June 2025 to accelerate its work on an agentic framework. Following the example of firms like Palantir, IFS has also created a group of forward-deployed engineers called Nexus Black, which spends multiple days at customer sites to identify potential use cases for industrial AI. Through several months of hands-on pilot projects with customers, this programme enabled IFS to design an industrial AI strategy that creates value for customers and aligns with existing business processes.

What are the key ingredients of successful AI implementation? For industrial firms, AI use cases need to:

•  Be integrated into existing workflows, such as dispatching field technicians to fix motors or valves.
•  Include learning and memory so the AI ‘digital worker’ gets smarter over time.
• Be narrowly-defined and offer high value when deployed at scale. For example, IFS customer Kodiak Gas Services – which operates natural gas compression plants – noted saving 15 minutes every time a field technician had to find a part, resulting in $3 million in annual cost savings.
• Incorporate appropriate human controls.

The digital process must also comply with cyber security rules, meet industrial data reliability targets and provide a human-visible audit trail. Collectively, IFS refers to these requirements as meeting the threshold of an enterprise-grade AI agent – or ‘digital worker’.

The ingenuity of the IFS strategy is that it splices together the firm’s decades-long knowledge of industrial workflows with an agentic AI innovation framework that reassures industrial tech buyers who are often slow to adopt new technologies. Where IFS has achieved ‘use case/AI agent fit’, it can drive rapid adoption for a single customer or other customers with similar processes. Revenue success for IFS will come from multiplying the number of successful AI agent use cases identified by the number of processes they can be implemented for. That’s a potentially vast market that can only be cracked by tech providers with industrial-grade credibility.