With new software team-up, AVEVA and IFS think they’ve closed the gap between AI insight and action

Newly minted software partners AVEVA and IFS think they have an AI-powered product that can help industrials close the gap between insight in the multitude of data that their systems gather and operational action in the form of smarter maintenance, investment and execution decisions.

AVEVA, a leader in industrial software, and IFS, similarly a leader in AI-powered enterprise software for asset-intensive industries, are logical partners. They’ve both become digital transformation heavyweights in their various software specialties, with IFS especially active in the last year with AI-related software announcements.

See also: Rockwell report: Days of ‘experimentation’ are over, DX is here to stay

AVEVA was acquired entirely by Schneider Electric in 2023 after a history in 3D plant design and CAD with a broadened focus a few years earlier in operations control, digital twins, and industrial AI, which has become the forte of IFS as well with recent products such as IFS Cloud and especially IFS.ai, which embeds industrial-grade AI and agentic automation, along with enterprise resource planning and field service management offerings.

The companies’ CEOs, Casper Herzberg of AVEVA and Mark Moffat of IFS, just announced their new collaboration at AVEVA World in Milan, Italy, with what the firms are calling Continuous Asset Decision Intelligence.

They said their new solution turns real-time operational and asset data, gleaned from IIoT connection points on factory infrastructure, into smarter maintenance, investment and execution decisions for customers.

“Industrial intelligence only becomes real when you have the complete picture,” Herzberg said. “Our partnership with IFS connects data and insights in powerful new ways, from sensor to boardroom. The architecture is right, the customer need is urgent, and the AI opportunity is now practical.”

Moffat added: “IFS helps customers turn asset insight into action across maintenance, service, workforce and capital planning. Together with AVEVA, we can give customers the operational context and enterprise AI they need to decide what work to do, when to do it, and whether to repair, defer or replace—with evidence from signal to outcome."

See also: Integrating IT, OT, and AI for real-world competitiveness

Problem, according to the two companies: Live operational data often sits with operations teams, while maintenance history, outage plans, spares, crew capacity and investment priorities are elsewhere.

Their example: A reliability engineer sees an anomaly, however it falls to the maintenance planner who only has partial information to determine whether there’s a fix already in the work plan, has the asset failed in this same way before, or is this a one-off event.

Questions come up: Should similar failures at other sites be expected and should the asset be repaired, maintenance deferred, or the asset replaced?

Last November, IFS debuted a product called Loops, a package of agentic AI “digital workers” programmed with common skills such as field dispatch, supplier coordination, customer order management, and inventory replenishment.

The agentic AI product is aimed at manufacturing, service industries, energy and utilities, telecoms, aerospace and defense, and the construction industry and purportedly frees the human labor force of more mundane tasks, or “improve operational performance while working right alongside employees to reduce manual tasks,” as IFS said in its PR behind its launch of the product at its Industrial X Unleashed conference in New York.

In April, IFS touted the strength of its "digital workers" as well as the launch of its IFS Loops Agent Studio.

Connecting decisions of every participant in a value chain

The AVEVA-IFS partnership that debuted this month in Milan is designed to answer questions about how decision flow is connected—where every participant in the value chain has the information and AI-enriched insight that they need to act with speed and confidence, according to the software companies.

See also: IFS expands cloud suite to include digital workers, applied industrial AI

"What makes this AVEVA-IFS partnership compelling is that it closes the distance between insight and action,” said Craig Resnick, VP of ARC Advisory Group.

“By connecting real-time operational intelligence with enterprise execution and strategic capital planning, Continuous Asset Decision Intelligence turns often thousands of data points into a single, evidence-based decision flow—so teams can decide what work to do, when to do it, and whether to repair, defer, or replace with greater speed and confidence.” Resnick added: “Just as importantly, it creates an auditable chain from asset condition to decision to outcome, which is increasingly critical for boards, investors, and regulators.”

In their PR with the announcement, the two companies said measurable outcomes for Continuous Asset Decision Intelligence include:

• IT/OT simplification: Platform-to-platform architecture replaces custom point-to-point integrations, reducing integration cost and accelerating time-to-value.
• Reliability: Real-time characterization of asset reliability problems autonomously prioritises work instructions with optimised crew dispatch. Detection-to-response lag drops from days or weeks to hours, and dynamic maintenance strategies replace calendar-based schedules.
• Capital efficiency: Operational and asset-health insights enable risk-ranked investment decisions, helping teams direct capital to the work that best advances reliability, safety, and business objectives.
• Regulatory and investment confidence: A continuous, auditable evidence chain—from asset condition to investment decisions to measurable performance outcomes—time-stamped and ready for regulators, boards, and investors.