2025.12.9：The Future of Industrial and Physical AI (Commentary)
Major announcements at IFS Industrial X Unleashed
Key Takeaways
- At their one-day IFS Industrial X Unleashed event in New York City, IFS highlighted the strategic importance of leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) across their solution portfolio.
- Their June 2025 acquisition of TheLoops, now IFS Loops, added industrial-grade agentic AI capabilities to the AI functionality already embedded in their solution.
- At the event, IFS announced four new partnerships—with Anthropic, 1X Technologies, Boston Dynamics, and Siemens Grid Software—that bring new technology and industry expertise that should turbocharge IFS’ pursuit of their Industrial AI vision.
CIMdata had the pleasure of attending the IFS Industrial X Unleashed event in New York City on 14 November 2025. A crowd of about 300 customers, partners, investors, analysts, and press joined the IFS team at the Spring Studios venue in SoHo for this information-packed event.[1]
IFS is a global provider of enterprise cloud and Industrial AI software, including Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Enterprise Asset Management (EAM), and Field Service Management (FSM). IFS focuses on six key industries: Aerospace and Defense, Energy Utilities and Resources, Manufacturing, Construction and Engineering, Service Industries, and Telecommunications. According to Mr. Mark Moffat, IFS’ CEO, the company is uniquely positioned to help customers in this new “Industrial AI” world. Through their focus on global, asset-intensive industries they leverage decades of operational data to power their solutions. Mr. Moffat emphasized in their mission-critical applications there is no room for error or hallucinations; they have to get it “99.9999% right.”
Over the years, CIMdata has noted IFS’ ability to move fast. Their efforts in artificial intelligence (AI) show that reputation is well-earned. Like many software companies, IFS has applied AI for years to support their portfolio. Shortly after the introduction of ChatGPT, IFS launched their IFS.ai branding, which cited existing work in AI and machine learning.[2] In May 2024 the company announced the IFS.ai Co-Pilot, leveraging Large Language Model (LLM)/generative AI (genAI) capabilities from their partner, Microsoft.[3] At their IFS Unleashed event in October 2024, the company claimed 300 genAI use cases were in development, with 60 delivered in 2024. AI figured prominently at IFS Connect 2025, a regional event held in Nashville, TN on 2-4 June 2025.[4] Just three weeks later, the company acquired TheLoops, a perfect fit to help IFS achieve their Industrial AI vision.[5] TheLoops offers a multi-agent environment where autonomous AI agents are composable and governed, leveraging traditional AI, symbolic AI, and genAI.[6]
This brings us back to the IFS Industrial X Unleased event where the company made several exciting announcements. IFS is partnering with Anthropic, a leading genAI solution provider, who shares IFS’ focus on Industrial AI, to develop powerful industrial AI solutions. They will not just white-label Claude, Anthropic’s genAI offering, stated Mr. Moffat. Their new collaboration with Boston Dynamics will help IFS combine their agentic AI capabilities with Boston Dynamics autonomous inspection robots to help asset-intensive organizations better manage and optimize their field operations. IFS and 1X Technologies, a provider of humanoid robotics, plan to jointly industrialize these robots for asset-intensive industries. Humanoid robots make a lot of sense. They can participate in a human-centric physical world, and rapidly learn through mimicking human operators in factory tasks. Finally, IFS announced a partnership with Siemens Grid Software. Many electrical grids were already suffering with underinvestment before the data center building boom for cloud computing, and now AI. The goal of the IFS-Siemens partnership is to enable the “autonomous grid of the future.”[7]
In recent years, in one-on-one meetings with IFS executives, CIMdata highlighted the benefits of 3D visualization in EAM and FSM use cases, and IFS has been hard at work making it happen. In the 25R1 release, IFS leveraged technology from Autodesk Cloud Services to add 3D visualization capabilities to their cloud platform.[8] CIMdata liked the capabilities highlighted during their presentations. 3D work instructions, a natural follow-on given their focus on asset management and field service, are in the works.
Conclusion
CIMdata was impressed by the company’s progress on AI, both technically and in achieving real benefits for their customers. IFS’ approach to AI aligns perfectly with CIMdata’s views on “augmented intelligence,” bringing AI to the point of work to augment the abilities of human users. Since 2022, IFS emphasized the “moment of service,” a mantra for how their software enabled their users to solve critical business issues, now being greatly expanded using multiple threads of AI capabilities that can capitalize on their deep industry knowledge. Based on recent presentations, their Nexus Black “tiger team” approach to solving customers’ problems is satisfying their “rapid deployment, rapid results” mantra. These new partnerships and recent acquisition should help them ramp up even faster, offering broader and deeper AI capabilities to their customer base.
[1] Research for this commentary was partially supported by IFS.
[2] https://www.themanufacturer.com/articles/ai-capabilities-enhanced-through-ifs-ai/.
[3] https://www.ifs.com/news/cloud/ifs-ai-capabilities-ifs-cloud.
[4] https://www.cimdata.com/en/resources/complimentary-reports-research/commentaries/item/27849-operationalizing-industrial-ai-ifs-connect-2025-commentary.
[5] https://www.ifs.com/news/corporate/ifs-acquires-theloops-to-launch-the-industrial-ai-workforce.
[6] https://theloops.io/.
[7] https://www.ifs.com/news/corporate/ifs-and-siemens-forge-strategic-partnership-to-power-the-autonomous-grid-of-the-future.
[8] https://www.ifs.com/news/cloud/ifs-cloud-25r1-release.