While the company is known simply as IFS today, it began life in 1983 as Industrial and Financial Systems in Sweden. The headquarters is still there at Linköping, Sweden, but now has global reach. Current CEO, formerly Chief Customer Officer, Mark Moffat is based in London. Locally, IFS customers include Qantas and Sydney Water.

And, while the company's core mission of providing software to help industry manage its maintenance and other essential programs, the company has fully embraced the power of AI with a bold new vision whereby it sees industrial AI as ushering in a new industrial revolution, a new era of untold productivity, personalisation, and capability, that even has the capability to reduce carbon emission by 2.6% while advancing enterprises globally.

Mark Moffat took to the stage at IFS.AI Unleashed 2024, the company's major in-person customer conference held this month in Orlando, Florida. "Our focus is AI," he said, "and our vision is to dominate the industrial software space for our core industries."

"Big data and robotics are impacting our world and industry," Moffat said. "Now the big change is coming - industrial AI."

For clarity, IFS services six core industries: aerospace and defense; construction and engineering; energy, utilities, and resources; manufacturing; service industries; and telecommunications.

The common factor, IFS CTO EMEA and APJ Vijay Jaswal explained to iTWire, is they are asset-rich industries. An asset might be a plane, for example, down to landing gears, or other components.

IFS has numerous modules, all the way from ERP and general ledger, accounts receivable and payable, through to field service, inventory, warehousing, maintenance, and more. They are like Lego bricks, Jaswal said, with customers able to plug and play modules as they grow or make more use of IFS features.

Putting it all together, Jaswal explains, "Qantas makes money when the plane is in the air. That plane, through regulation, has to have its engine cleaned and dismantled every so many thousands of hours of operation. Imagine one part missing from the warehouse and taking two weeks to arrive."

"We make sure when that plane arrives for maintenance all the parts are there, the right engineers are there with the right skills, and the engineer has the right tools. We bring the right engineer at the right place to the right plane. We orchestrate it all so everything and everyone is where they all need to be. Our mission is to keep the plane in the air as much as possible."

Or, putting it even more simply, Jaswal adds, it's all about keeping the "Top Gun type hardware" running. "All that maintenance is driven by IFS tech. That's how I like to simplify what we do and the value we bring. It's the right person, right skillset, right tools, and right spare part."

"There's no point having field service go out to Newcastle if the router's bust and they don't have another one. They need to go back, reschedule, take the afternoon off ... IFS is all about efficiencies, and the first-time fix. It doesn't matter if it's a utility company, manufacturing facility, or 5G company."

That's IFS, and the company has been successful in its 41 years since 1983, entrenched in many major industries in many countries.

Yet, IFS isn't content to rest on its laurels. While it has a strong, demonstrated, proven history of success, the business wants more, Moffat said. "It's a new time for driving growth and progress where innovation meets action," he said, forecasting a new world where manufacturing is revolutionised, where smart energy powers a sustainable future, where society is advanced through quantum breakthroughs and where new revenue lines are created through AI-powered services.

It's a time to unleash the innovation and power of industrial AI. "It's a real moment in time for us," Moffat said. "It's the next industrial revolution, being powered by industrial AI."

As you see, industrial AI was the big theme, the big phrase, of the event. However industrial AI is not simply AI as applied to industry. IFS chief product officer Christian Pederson explained "industrial AI" means more. It means an AI that is rock-solid, based on fact and detail, with not even 1% of a chance of hallucination, and further, that every interaction with the AI is imbued with the full context in which it operates - industry, environment, machine, part, engineer, process.

"In a world flooded with generic AI, only industrial AI applies knowledge in full context, making it truly intelligent," Pederson said.

"All companies, all businesses will benefit from this ambition," Moffat said. "We're building on our expanded track record, expanding our depth in a way that transcends people and service."

"We're creating a class-leading AI platform that empowers customers globally to dynamically manage their mission-critical assets, workflows, people, and service in a responsible way."

The clear message from IFS Unleashed 2024 is that industrial AI can be transformative and boundary-breaking for your business. Whether you run a manufacturing site, maintain a fleet of aircraft, or are building facilities for tomorrow’s smart cities, the IFS AI tech is all about enabling organisations to be their best when it matters most to their customers - at the moment of service. IFS.ai is the backbone of IFS’s ERP, Asset Management (EAM) and Service Management (FSM and ITSM) solutions. IFS has over 7,000 employees in more than 80 countries, has more than 500 partners in its network, and supports thousands of customers worldwide, with many more tens and hundreds of thousands of workers.

As an example of what can be achieved, Moffat said, "today we have a market-leading schedule and optimisation engine. We have 314,682 men and women managed in the field and in service. Our operational platform ingests vast quantums of time series data from some of the biggest natural resources companies in the world."

Putting it all together, the message is industrial AI will provide great new ways of optimisation that results in an equal amount of carbon reduction. In fact, Moffat stated the company genuinely believes it can result in a 2.6% decrease in global carbon emissions.

"That's absolutely huge, that's 940 megatonnes," Moffat said. "That's equivalent to the emissions of the entire aviation industry for one year."

"It's better business too - reduce fuel costs, have better processes, smarter business."

Accenture forecasts that AI will add 14 trillion USD to the global economy within the next decade. "Whatever you read, whoever you listen to, there's a gigantic amount of opportunity," Moffat said.

"There's a huge amount of economic output and value and you have a choice. You can watch it happen all around us - and it will - or you can run towards it and grab the opportunity with both hands."

"That's what IFS Unleashed 2024 is all about."