What you'll learn:
- The new iteration of Loops debuted at IFS Industrial X Unleased in New York on Nov. 13.
- This 10-agent “workforce” in Loops is programmed with 50-plus (to be 100-plus by December) skills that assist industrials with autonomous management of high-volume tasks.
- Smart Industry’s Scott Achelpohl and Thomas Wilk of Plant Services spoke to IFS Loops CEO Somya Kapoor about the product at the New York rollout for this podcast.
Smart Industry on Nov. 19 reported for our audience on the new iteration of Loops, a business that multinational software company IFS acquired recently and a software product that the company updated and debuted Nov. 13 at its show in New York, Industrial X Unleashed.
Head of Content Scott Achelpohl and Thomas Wilk, who chiefs sister brand Plant Services, were in the Big Apple for the show and teamed up for a conversation with Somya Kapoor, CEO of the Loops segment of IFS’s business, about the 10 agentic AI “digital workers” at the heart of Loops.
See also: IFS debuts package of ‘digital workers’ in next iteration of agentic AI industrial software
This agentic “workforce” is programmed with 50-plus (soon to be 100-plus in December, according to the company) skills that assist industrials with autonomous management of high-volume tasks like field dispatch, supplier coordination, customer order management, and inventory replenishment.
The agentic AI product is aimed squarely at manufacturing along with service industries, energy and utilities, telecoms, aerospace and defense, and construction.
The conversation with Somya was spirited, detailed Loops, and followed her presentation to the audience at Industrial X Unleashed, and we present it as this Smart Industry and Plant Services co-branded episode of Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast.
Below is an excerpt from the podcast:
About the Podcast
Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast offers news and information for the people who make, store, and move things and those who manage and maintain the facilities where that work gets done. Manufacturers from chemical producers to automakers to machine shops can listen for critical insights into the technologies, economic conditions, and best practices that can influence how to best run facilities to reach operational excellence.
[Scott Achelpohl] We're coming to you from IFS Industrial X Conference in New York. You can tell it's noisy here. Our guest on the pod today is Somya Kapoor. She's CEO of IFS Loops. which we found out today is a very interesting and forward-reaching product. It's an update, if I may say an update, of the company's AI agent platform. IFS debuted an update at the conference, what it calls the next evolution of Loops here at IFX Industrial X. So welcome to the program, Somya
[Somya Kapoor] Very excited to be here, folks.
Q&A: How analytics, AI, digital twins help manufacturers build resilient supply chains
[SA] The new IFS loops, as it were, is a product that delivers industrial customers templated digital workers equipped with 50 agentic skills now, today, as we speak, right? Yes, and supposedly 100 plus by next month. December 2025, right?
[SK] That’s right.
[SA] That autonomously manages high-volume operational tasks, including field dispatch, supplier coordination, customer order manager, and inventory replenishment across enterprise systems with real-time intelligence, audit-ready compliance, and domain-specific understanding.
These AI agents are, as IFS puts it, designed for mission-critical workflows in manufacturing, the service sector, energy and utilities, telecom, aerospace and defense, and the construction industry.
Somya, today during your presentation, you told us that the pace of operational change is faster than ever, with complexity growing faster than human teams or legacy systems can handle. Operations leaders and CIOs can't wait for months of IT rollout to benefit from new capabilities. IFS Loops gives companies a digital workforce they can deploy today. Tell us more about your product.
See also: How digital transformation and AI can redefine supply chains
[SK] Absolutely. So as kind of already mentioned, IFS Loops is an industrial grade agentic platform that we have from the acquisition that IFS did in June, and we already have customers deploying it in production.
What we've given everybody is this agentic capability that helps you build and redefine your processes by mashing data from different systems where you're not constantly bogged down by, oh my God, my data is in one system and the other, but really rethink a process from a pain point and a business outcome standpoint.
For instance, a supplier order manager really helps you process your orders autonomously, sitting in your inbox day in, day out. Right now, you do might have two people manning that inbox, five people, we have customers, but they're doing that manual job of taking and looking at every P.O. entry and then taking that PDF or e-mail body or finding a part ID and then manually loading it into IFS Cloud.
See also: Talking to your data: Agentic AI’s utility in process manufacturing
We're now the digital worker of supplier order manager. You can not only upload that data automatically into IFS Cloud. If you like, you can also communicate with your customer if certain parts of that order are missing, like sometimes shipping information, part information. It also goes, looks at the part conversions within the IFS Cloud and makes a conversion necessary so you successfully can update that within the IFS Cloud data.
Now, we do understand, you know, AI is not perfect, so there's always exceptions. So how do you do exception handling is also something that we do as part of the Agentic platform. So it's just not about deploying these digital workers, but how do you monitor them? How do you audit trail? When exceptions handling, just like a human in the job, how do you go retrain them? All those factors are today provided out-of-the-box.
[Thomas Wilk] Right. It's different than just tracking down Joe or Jalen on the floor who put the wrong lube in the bearing, right?
[SK] Exactly. It's a whole new frontier when it does come to addressing AI traceability.
And that's what is the key aspect of industrial-grade solutions, right? Because these are deployed in highly regulated environments, and you want to make sure that there is an audit trail for everything that the AI is doing. So as part of the platform, we do have a supervisor platform, a supervisor agent. For every digital worker, that it keeps the audit trail and monitors, and we leave it up to you to do the change management aspect of it than just to say, Oh, this is just coming for a plain automation, and that's very static in nature.
See also: The hardware problem that is stalling half of all digital transformation projects
[TW] In your relationship with IFS, I know it's fairly long-standing, but the formal acquisition took place earlier this year, like June, July, correct
[SK] That was June, yes.
[TW] OK, how has that gone for the company and IFS? I guess the first question is, how did your companies get to know each other better, and then what led to the acquisition? How has that been going?
[SK] So, IFS was a customer of Loops before the acquisition. They actually bought us in the CX space as an agentic solution to help their support, optimize their support operations. Soon enough, they started digging deeper, and they're like, oh, they're fishing for some agentic solution in the market, and they had conversations, and this seemed like the perfect marriage, because we were moving out from the CX operations into other operations that we wanted to get, and because of the platform approach that we had taken, where we were just not a platform to just build agents. but also to monitor, test, deploy, versioning, security, governance aspect that got them really attracted to us, and that's where the marriage happened.
See also: Taming the data beast is the first step toward smart operations that cannot be skipped
Now, how is it going? It's going actually really well. We've just been in, what, 120 days in. We have our few customers live in production in the industrial space, using our digital workers that we just launched out-of-the-box, and actually are scaling to everything else, so it's quite fascinating, and we did have our first customer on stage That actually articulated the value. They went live in seven weeks of using material replenisher, and that is getting them 3 million in cost savings and 90,000 hours saved.
About the Author
Scott Achelpohl
Head of Content
I've come to Smart Industry after stints in business-to-business journalism covering U.S. trucking and transportation for FleetOwner, a sister website and magazine of SI’s at Endeavor Business Media, and branches of the U.S. military for Navy League of the United States. I'm a graduate of the University of Kansas and the William Allen White School of Journalism with many years of media experience inside and outside B2B journalism. I'm a wordsmith by nature, and I edit Smart Industry and report and write all kinds of news and interactive media on the digital transformation of manufacturing.