IFS 推出 IFS Intelligence，並以全新 Industrial AI Harness 作為治理基礎

IFS launched IFS Intelligence on October 13, 2026, at its IFS Unleashed event in Orlando, Florida, a product the company says gathers data from the assets, systems and processes of an industrial operation and converts it into action within minutes.

According to the launch announcement, IFS Intelligence executes work inside the systems that run physical operations, drawing on live data from IFS and third-party systems and operating only within rules the business defines. IFS said people in the field, on the plant floor, on a rig or in an office can pose plain-language questions through a single conversational interface, and that the product reasons over live operational data to explain current conditions and plan next steps, showing its sources, before acting on that plan under the governance of the company’s Industrial AI Harness.

IFS framed the product around capacity losses it said industrial organizations have learned to operate with: unplanned downtime carries a target, missed first-time fixes are built into service plans and scrap has an allowance. The company traced much of that loss to systems that do not talk to each other, screens that take months to learn, implementations that take years and the spreadsheets and workarounds people build to bridge the gaps, and said IFS Intelligence is designed to close the gap between what an operation knows and what it can get done.

Cowork, Loops and Runway

The product offers three ways to put the AI to work. Cowork lets users pose plain-language questions against live operational data, investigate problems and stage actions that execute only after a person approves them. An answer can be saved as a Lens, a live view that keeps updating as operations change, and a successful piece of work can be stored as a Skill that anyone can repeat. Cowork also reaches connected systems such as Microsoft 365 through MCP.

Loops assigns defined workflows to digital workers that operate in the background and escalate to people when judgment or approval is required, and teams build their own digital workers in Studio. Runway applies plain-language requirements to speed up migrating, configuring and extending IFS software, which the company said reduces implementation effort and risk.

The IFS Intelligence product page describes scenarios across the Invest, Produce, Maintain and Operate functions. Under Invest, a user can detect a slipping project, draw up the change order and route it for approval within a single conversation, and nothing changes until the user signs off. Under Produce, when a line goes down, the product lays out the impact and prepares the fix for approval while digital workers chase supplier confirmations and involve a person only when a decision is needed. Under Maintain, a failed asset brings up the service-level impact alongside a prepared work order and reassignments, and a daily skill flags at-risk jobs and drafts escalations before they breach. Under Operate, users can raise a purchase requisition, submit timecards or chase overdue receivables in one conversation, with no record change committed until it is approved.

The Industrial AI Harness

In a companion announcement published the same day at the event, IFS introduced the Industrial AI Harness as the operational foundation of IFS Intelligence, built to put AI to work within the permissions, policies and operational realities that govern a business. The Harness has six components, each intended to prevent a specific failure: planning and orchestration decompose goals into steps and coordinate agents and tools; skills and connectors define and validate the systems agents may use; memory and context carry progress forward and assemble only the information relevant to a task; guardrails and permissions enforce identity, approvals and limits on risky actions; verification and escalation check work for correctness and policy compliance; and observability and auditability record every decision and action so it can be traced and reviewed.

The Harness operates through the customer’s existing identity, permissions, business rules, approvals and audit controls, inheriting permissions and access controls from connected systems with IFS Cloud as the foundation source. IFS said raw data is not sent to external AI providers, and that AI access and actions stay within what the signed-in user is authorized to see and do. The Harness is designed to work across AI models and services rather than locking customers into a single provider. IFS described sovereignty, staged autonomy, industrial context and multi-layer governance as differentiators of the combined platform, which it called the only AI platform for industrial companies delivering those traits. Under the company’s description, staged autonomy moves workers from copilot assistance to recommendations and then to autonomous action with escalation on uncertainty, and industrial context pairs domain expertise with curated tooling IFS said prevents agents from being paralyzed by 70,000 available APIs.

The announcement cited new IFS research finding that 43% of frontline teams trained and introduced agentic digital workers into day-to-day operations over the past 12 months, while 11% validated AI outputs for safety, quality or mission-critical processes and 11% established control mechanisms for AI use with sensitive or export-controlled data. It also cited Futurum research finding that 66% of enterprises plan to invest in digital workers within the next 12 months, while 5.7% trust AI to act fully autonomously.

Mo Dawood, chief information officer of Eight Group, said his company decided against building AI agents in-house because of the governance, technical expertise and knowledge required and the speed at which things are advancing. He said the Harness supports the governance underneath, monitors the orchestration and gets digital workers to act safely.

Toby Rees, global head of AI trust at IFS, said that as organizations scale AI across critical assets, supply chains, service operations and enterprise workflows, success will depend on combining intelligence with context, control, accountability and operational discipline. “From auditable processes and transparent governance to the ethical use of AI, IFS treats trust as a fundamental requirement, not an ambition,” he said.

Early Customer Use and Executive Statements

IFS said customers are already using IFS Intelligence in business-critical scenarios. In one case it described, a production manager learned that a large order due the next quarter was at risk, and working out why required connecting inventory, production capacity, supplier commitments, logistics constraints and the financial impact of delay. According to IFS, a single question identified the risk, surfaced likely causes and recommended a next action the manager could approve and set in motion, replacing what had taken several reports, systems and specialists with one governed flow from question to action.

Curtis Taylor, chief business operations officer at Sims Crane & Equipment, said he had been assembling skills one at a time to open up his company’s operational data to employees when he first saw the product. He said that, out of the box, it can surface all the data held in the company’s systems, letting staff ask questions about the fleet, such as which cranes would best suit a given customer requirement, and improve fleet efficiency.

IFS chief executive Mark Moffat said the company often sees industrial organizations operating at around 60% of their potential. “The missing 40% is already inside the business,” Moffat said. “It sits in the expertise of the control room, the knowledge of the night shift, and the data spread across every system.” He said IFS Intelligence lets people ask a question, take action or hand a task to a digital worker, all within the rules, permissions and approvals that govern their business.

Nick Patience, vice president and practice lead of the AI group at The Futurum Group, said frontline teams at industrial organizations generate insights faster than enterprise systems can act on them, and that customers need AI systems grounded in sector-specific operational constraints so the recommendations and actions they surface can be accurate, carried out and relied upon.

Availability and Licensing

IFS Intelligence is available now under what the company described as a universal enterprise-wide license, unlocking its capabilities across the full spectrum of in-scope IFS software a customer has licensed, with no feature-gating or tiering. Customers also receive an entitlement of AI Executions, which IFS described as a fair usage cap rather than a credit model.