By combining deep insights about the industry with AI, IFS claims that Nexus Black creates the conditions for quickly and safely introducing smart solutions that benefit business. The solution is a tailor-made program where each assignment is shaped around the client’s needs and goals.
Combining Advanced AI with Deep Industry Knowledge
Overall, IFS SVP, Matt Kempson, believes that with Nexus Black, IFS combines advanced AI technology with deep industry knowledge and a dedicated team to better address complex challenges in asset-intensive industries. The solution is built on the IFS.ai platform and enables rapid development and implementation of AI capabilities, from idea to results in just a few weeks.
Nexus Black offers customers:
- Smooth, fast and needs-driven efforts in stages. A proven working method that delivers secure and scalable results.
- A clear four-step process: Identify challenges, test solutions, rapid development and digital continuity.
- Access to AI specialists, industry experts and system architects with a deep understanding of industrial needs.
- Joint development work in AI with a focus on solutions that work at scale.
IFS is in a Rapid Development Loop
As a backdrop for what IFS is now putting on the table, it is notable that the company has quickly developed cutting-edge solutions around AI. There are two aspects of AI in this context which give a clear distinction between AI and generative AI (genAI): AI analyzes and interprets existing data to improve efficiency, accuracy, and decision-making within predefined limits. This is while generative AI creates text, images, music and models based on existing data.
Important basic components in this regard for IFS are partly IFS Cloud, the cloud platform, and partly the genAI pieces, with IFS.ai services available across virtually the entire IF Cloud offering and across the specific six industry solutions that characterize the company’s customer target groups: aerospace & defense, energy, construction, manufacturing, services and telecom.
At the end of last year, there were over 300 AI use cases under development, with 60 use cases delivered in 2024. The fact that the Swedish ERP player is also taking AI very seriously is confirmed not least by that 30% of the company’s 7,000 employees work in R&D, a doubling in the last five years.
Implementation Programs are not Uncommon
When it comes to putting together programs to kick-start AI initiatives at existing user companies or potential new customers, these are not uncommon, but many solution providers do so with more emphasis on business assessments and constructing ROI models to help make implementation decisions, rather than on the technical and organizational aspects. However, as analyst CIMdata noted in its comment on IFS’ efforts in this area, “many use these ROI models to justify their investment decisions, but then ignore them.” By implication: IFS does not do it this way, but instead emphasizes the technical and organizational issues surrounding implementation. Then with a focus on AI, especially genAI.
“For some time, many industrial software solution providers have been leveraging machine learning (ML) to improve user experience (UX). Today, software companies are embedding genAI into applications to leverage general knowledge and business intelligence to improve UX, reducing mundane work so users can focus on making better decisions,” the analyst writes, noting that IFS has been using AI for several years.
Christian Pedersen, IFS CPO, argued on this during the company’s recent Unleashed event that AI is everywhere and that IFS is applying it to its core functions. In this discussion, it was clear that IFS was using Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), which applies contextual data about the user and their needs to focus genAI support, CIMdata noted.
RAG is the process of optimizing the output of a large language model, so it references an authoritative knowledge base outside of its training data sources before generating an answer. This, said Pedersen, “allows Industrial AI to understand your context, your people, and will help make the future of industrial AI-driven.”
The Importance of the Ecosystem for Sharper AI
Another interesting AI aspect related to IFS is that the company’s partners play an important role. For example, Boomi, a long-time IFS partner in the ecosystem, known for its drag-and-drop, no-code integration and automation platform, has worked on a genAI-enabled integration. For example, with genAI, Boomi built six live AI agents to help build custom integrations between IFS and SAP.
“Just give Boomi a text description of your integration and it builds it. You can review the data and the flow it creates, make changes with a few clicks, and then instantiate it. Boomi will even write the documentation for the integration, in the language of your choice, Steve Lucas, chairman and CEO of Boomi, said at the Unleashed event six months ago. Lucas called it the beginning of the “agentic future.”
In short, with its newly launched Nexus Black, IFS can make a difference on the path to successful AI projects. In a press release, the company writes:
“By combining deep industry insights with AI, Nexus Black creates the conditions for quickly and safely introducing smart solutions that benefit the business. Nexus Black is a tailored program where each assignment is shaped based on the customer’s needs and goals.”
If the company can live up to this mission statement, it’s valuable at a time when, according to recent AI studies from Gartner, “half of the organizations (in a recent survey theythey produced) have adopted Al, but where most are still in the early stages of implementation or experimentation, testing the technologies on a small scale or in specific use cases, as they work to overcome challenges with unclear ROI, insufficient AI-ready data and a lack of internal AI expertise.”
Nexus Black Can Become an Interesting Catalyst
How problematic is it really to introduce AI, Artificial Intelligence, into the increasingly digitalized work of industrial companies? The question is of course hyper-current and if you are to believe the latest figures from analyst Gartner, the introduction of AI is already today a mindboggling big deal today. According to a recent forecast, global spending on generative AI (GenAI) is expected to reach $644 billion in 2025. This would represent a 76.4% increase compared to 2024.
However, the analyst concludes, “this growth rate will not be enough.” Rather, those responsible for investments in the area in companies should prepare for rising GenAI spending in 2025 in order to achieve functional and productive solutions, driven by better basic models. Here, IFS Nexus Black can become an interesting catalyst. Whether this can be achieved in – as IFS writes in the press material, “in a few weeks” – depends on how complex the project is. But generally, it probably takes longer on average.
