In this episode of Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast, Smart Industry's Scott Achelpohl and IndustryWeek's Dennis Scimeca spoke about what they saw at IFS Unleashed in October in Orlando, Florida.
IFS is a global supplier of enterprise and industrial software. In his keynote at Unleashed, CEO Mark Moffat said that $2.4 trillion in assets use IFS software. IFS has also invested substantial time and energy into stressing the AI functionality of its software.
See also: New IFS product grabs industrial data for a single, AI-powered interface
The conversation between Scott and Dennis highlighted the theme of AI and "digital workers" at the show. They also discussed the announcement of two partnerships, between IFS and Aveva, and IFS and Siemens Digital Industries Software.
In Orlando, the company also debuted IFS Intelligence, which IFS said can collate data from all types of industrial assets, systems, and processes all around an operation and turn that information into actionable tasks that flows through one conversational interface, another main point of the conversation.
Below is a partial transcript of this Great Question podcast:
Dennis Scimeca: We heard at IFS discussions about AI and governance, which is part of a growing theme in some of the AI stories I'm working on. I know some manufacturers are using de facto help desks or AI organizations or certain common materials they're sharing with everybody.
The idea is that governance will grow out of that in part because employees are being given all of these rules at the same time they're given access to these tools. Did you hear anything at Unleashed about governance?
Scott Achelpohl: You know, I did. Governance is kind of happening as a cart before the horse, honestly. It's not surprising that the surge toward industrial AI is such a tsunami that governance would frankly be lagging.
We covered this in an Oct. 13 Smart Industry story we wrote from the conference. Governance was part of IFS's own research. It was sort of a preview story of the show. Their research showed that there was a divide between immediate factory floor level industrial AI execution and strategies in the C-suite for the technology.
See also: IFS launches industrial AI control, governance, security platform
As operational workers, they're already driving real AI implementation while leadership is trying to catch up on AI safety and how to scale the technology longer term. That is all about governance, how to govern the technology. They kind of have to make up the rules behind when implementations are actually starting. There are cybersecurity worries too, and headstrong adopters are having to meet the stark realities. There are implementations going on, and the rules to govern all of it are just kind of trying to catch up.
DS: I feel like everybody needs to get on governance sooner rather than later. Now, the [other] thing from the conference that stuck with me is the concept of "digital workers." It's an agentic AI-based technology. At first it sounded to me just like new branding for agentic AI.
SA: I take a little bit more of a nuanced view. IFS is very big on adding products onto familiar branding that add functionality to software that they've already released. In the last year, you had Loops, AI Harness, IFS Intelligence.
We've kind of reached a point where agentic AI might need some new branding in order to keep looking fresh since we hear about it so much. But the products, however, are interesting as is the functionality of it all.
In the case of digital workers, as you mentioned, how IFS is adding more job descriptions onto the manufacturing roles that agentic AI can fill. They're adding more into the workflow and not making it an isolated task there.
Podcast: Do manufacturers dream of 'digital workers'?
The digital workers are now starting to become, as they emphasized at the conference, part of a whole team of digital workers that do some of the same jobs, but not the same, but form a kind of an AI agent team.
It all made for very flashy demonstrations, but there was a fair amount of substance at the show. I benefit from having covered all of this before and kind of been to IFS's shows each year and had been able to watch the progression of their releases and what they're trying to do.
