Redefining industrial AI with digital workers

At the recently held IFS Industrial X Unleashed, Vaibs Kumar, Senior Vice President of Technology at IFS, spoke to CXO DX about  how industrial AI, digital workers, and advanced automation are reshaping complex operations across global industries.

 How do advancements like the digital workers augment operational teams, whether in the field, factory, office, or across supply chains?

Digital workers and embedded AI will significantly amplify what businesses can accomplish with the same resources. Our customers operate highly complex industrial environments, and over the years we’ve built software capable of supporting that complexity. Now, with digital workers embedded across the system, repetitive execution is taken over by autonomous agents, while humans shift into supervisory roles such as monitoring, guiding, and optimizing the work rather than performing every task themselves. It elevates human involvement to far more strategic decision-making.

 Does that mean industrial AI won’t replace humans but rather work alongside them?

Absolutely. We do not believe humans disappear from the loop. Their responsibilities evolve, and they oversee agent activity, intervene where necessary, and coach digital workers to improve accuracy and outcomes. These hybrid human-AI roles, which barely exist today, will ultimately define the next generation of industrial operations.

You announced partnerships with Anthropic, Boston Dynamics, Siemens, and Microsoft. What value do these bring?

Each partnership strengthens a different aspect of our ecosystem. With Anthropic, we use Claude to power our GenAI capabilities. Boston Dynamics brings world-class industrial robotics that can be deployed directly into the operational environments we support. Siemens has integrated our scheduling optimization into its own offerings, going beyond the GridX partnership. Microsoft, meanwhile, has been a long-standing collaborator, and we are now developing joint go-to-market motions while integrating our planning and optimization tools into Microsoft Dynamics. Although there are areas where we compete, both companies understand the value of strategic cooperation, and the synergies far outweigh the overlaps.

Is your cloud strategy tied exclusively to Microsoft Azure?

While our primary focus is on Azure, we remain fully cloud-agnostic. Customers can run our software on our cloud service, on their own cloud environments, or entirely on-premises if required. The same software stack can operate anywhere, even in highly remote or constrained locations. We believe customers should always retain the choice of deployment model.

How has industrial AI changed your solution landscape compared to earlier generations?

Industrial AI has introduced a major step-change. The biggest difference is the amplification of capability: organisations can now derive deeper insights and execute processes at a dramatically higher scale, all with the same resources. This leads to higher productivity, reduced downtime, improved safety and reliability, and ultimately better outcomes for customers and end users. It’s a transformation that touches every layer of operations.

You use several forms of AI and multiple LLMs. How do you orchestrate them? Do customers request specific models?

Behind the scenes, we use different LLMs based on their strengths. Claude is excellent for code generation, OpenAI models are strong in reasoning, and Gemini performs well in vision-based tasks. Customers rarely ask for specific LLMs. They are more interested in the outcomes and value. Our job is to abstract the complexity and ensure the right model is applied to the right task without requiring customers to think about the underlying technology.

How do you determine which processes can be automated and where humans should stay involved?

Every customer is different. The degree of automation depends on their risk tolerance, the criticality of the process, and their overall digital maturity. Some workflows, like triage, can be fully autonomous. Others may require human oversight initially until confidence and accuracy are established. No two implementations look the same because each organisation has its own operating environment and constraints.

Many industries still rely on legacy infrastructure. How do you approach modernization cycles in such environments?

Legacy environments are common across regions, including the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. When machinery is decades old and lacks telemetry, the answer is often simple augmentation rather than replacement. Low-cost sensors can be added to collect vibration, heat, or pressure data. Our Operational Intelligence software can then stream this data into the cloud, allowing customers to generate insights and take action. We tailor our implementation to each customer’s maturity level rather than forcing a one-size-fits-all approach.

Which regions are seeing the strongest growth for IFS?

Northwest Europe, Scandinavia, the UK, France, the Middle East, and Japan are major markets for us. While modern regions like the Gulf have newer infrastructure, many organisations, even in the Middle East, still contend with legacy systems, especially in sectors such as utilities and energy. Growth opportunities therefore exist across all regions, each at a different stage of maturity.

What are your priority industry verticals today?

Our core verticals include energy and utilities, manufacturing, construction and engineering, shipbuilding, transport, telecommunications, and aerospace. Within these industries, our strongest focus areas are manufacturing operations, asset management, and field service operations. These three domains underpin the majority of industrial workflows we support.

As digital workers take on more execution, how does this affect trust, especially for end consumers?

End consumers ultimately care about service quality, reliability, and cost. They are not concerned with whether a digital worker performed the task. For our customers, however, trust is critical. We offer preventive mechanisms that allow them to involve humans in the loop at key points, and detective controls that allow full visibility into the actions taken by digital workers. This level of transparency helps organisations build confidence in autonomous operations.

How do you support customers with training, upskilling, and change management as they adopt AI-driven workflows?

Our implementation and customer success teams play a central role. Customer success in an AI-first world requires new types of expertise, and we are dedicated to building those capabilities. Guiding organisations through behavioural change, process redesign, and workforce enablement is now as important as deploying the technology itself.

How does the Loops acquisition strengthen your agentic AI capabilities?

Loops allows us to own the agentic AI layer rather than relying on external providers. It powers digital workers inside IFS Cloud but can also sit on top of other business systems, giving customers a high degree of flexibility. This composability means organisations can adopt digital workers without needing to overhaul their entire software estate.

Can your components operate independently of the full IFS suite?

Yes. Our technology is fully composable. Customers can use our scheduling optimisation capability on its own, integrate our workforce management capabilities into their existing systems, or deploy digital workers independently through Loops. They adopt what they need without committing to the entire stack.

How do you balance cloud and on-prem deployment requirements?

We encourage customers to use our cloud service, but they retain full deployment choice. The same software can run on-prem, in hybrid environments, in sovereign clouds, or in their own private cloud environments. Flexibility is a fundamental part of our design philosophy.

How do you train AI models while ensuring compliance with regulations such as GDPR?

We train AI models specifically on a customer’s own data and deliver those models exclusively to that customer. This ensures privacy and compliance, while also creating solutions that are highly tailored to the organisation’s operations. When customers run on IFS Cloud, their data is already within a secure environment, making this training process seamless.

Looking ahead, what do the next two to three years look like for IFS?

Digital workers will become widespread within the next year. Beyond that, the next frontier is physical AI with digital workers operating in tandem with robotics. This convergence will unlock an entirely new level of industrial efficiency and will reshape how factories, utilities, and infrastructure organisations operate.