Mark Moffat, CEO of IFS, used his keynote at IFS Industrial X Unleashed to send a clear message: the industrial world is entering a new era of AI-driven operations, and IFS intends to lead that transformation with “Industrial AI Applied” — a shift from hype and demos to real-world, context-aware AI embedded directly into the flow of work.
Moffat opened by positioning IFS as uniquely placed to guide asset-intensive industries through the most significant technological shift in decades. “We all acknowledge that AI will change business,” he said. “Now we must move beyond that to the how — delivering specific, meaningful, measurable outcomes. Industrial AI must be grounded in practical application.”
He emphasised that while generative models have captured global attention, most AI available today “does not operate in context.” Industrial operations require AI that understands physical environments, safety constraints, and mission-critical processes. “This is PhD-level complexity,” he noted. “Intelligence means nothing unless it’s applied to day-to-day operations.”
Moffat also highlighted the unprecedented scale of global investment into industrial infrastructure and AI — over $10 trillion annually for new plants, grids and supply chains, and a projected $7 trillion to be spent in the next five years on data centres, chips and AI infrastructure. “Chips have a three-to-five-year lifespan,” he said. “This investment cycle is just beginning.”
Yet he warned of a widening gap between financial investment and real-world AI deployment. “No one is building the control and intelligence layers needed for factories, grids and field operations — except IFS,” he said. “We’ve been preparing for this moment for decades with deep industry knowledge, operational data and thousands of pre-trained workflows.”
In a major announcement, Moffat unveiled a series of high-profile partnerships that form the backbone of the new Industrial X strategy:
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Anthropic — a world-first partnership bringing Claude’s trusted enterprise AI capabilities into industrial workflows, designed for safety, context and mission-critical reliability.
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Boston Dynamics — integrating IFS with Spot the robot dog to automate inspections, field operations and hazardous-site assessments.
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1X Technologies — collaborating around the new NEO humanoid robot for manufacturing, logistics and supply chain operations.
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Siemens — using IFS.ai to help design and manage tomorrow’s intelligent power grids.
“These partnerships are not about reselling technology,” Moffat stressed. “They are about creating new capabilities and putting them into the hands of the workforce.”
He also showcased real applied AI use cases, including utilities using AI-vision powered patrol vehicles to detect micro-fractures and equipment stress that human inspectors often miss. Using IFS’s orchestration engine, issues identified at 45mph can be automatically routed to the right technician with the right skills, transforming inspection from reactive to predictive.
Another major theme was the rise of the “10x workforce,” where robotics and digital workers multiply human capacity in industries struggling with labour shortages. Moffat cited the 170 million new jobs projected by 2030 — alongside 92 million displaced — as evidence of the coming shift. “The constraint isn’t efficiency,” he said. “It’s capacity. AI and robotics allow 300 workers to deliver the output of 3,000.”
To support this new, blended workforce, IFS highlighted its Loops platform, which manages the lifecycle of humans, digital workers and robots — from onboarding and training to logging, auditing and retirement. “This is what nobody else is solving for,” Moffat said. “Highly regulated industries need full traceability.”
Moffat closed with a challenge to the room: pilots fail when they lack context, governance or real operational value. “Industrial AI applied means embedding AI where it matters — in the field, in the plant, in mission-critical operations. And today, we flip the switch.”
IFS Industrial X Unleashed marks the beginning of that next chapter — practical, context-aware AI built for the real world, not the brochure.
