In the two years since generative AI came into the consciousness of the wider business world and the public, there has been widescale panic among firms about how they should react.
In Microsoft’s case, the obvious thing to do was to up its initial investment in OpenAI, the inventor of ChatGPT, seen as the godfather of accessible generative AI. That major, but minority investment, took the value of Open AI up to $80 billion.
Since then, IT vendors and their partners have tried to raise their game when it comes to AI-driven business solutions, and business software/ERP provider IFS is no different.
It is holding its Unleashed 24 event in Orlando, Florida this week, and has unveiled a number of AI-based products and upgrades to tempt it 400 global partners into the AI fray.
Bob De Caux (pictured), chief AI officer at IFS, told IT Europa: “We’re in the AI race, and have tried to to see where it works for our customers. But at the beginning of ChatGPT and other generative AI technology, we didn’t have huge resources to trial it and find use cases for every single industry we’re in.
“Initially, there wouldn’t have been straightforward solutions that could have been immediately adopted by some of our customers in closely regulated industries anyway.”
De Caux however, says IFS is now in a better place to support its partners and customers in the AI space. At Unleashed, the company promised that it would have 60 AI use cases using its products and services by the end of this year, for instance.
As previously reported, it is also inviting partners and customers to take part in a benchmarking exercise through the IFS Community, to find suitable AI implementation models for specific industry verticals, in partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
“We can now scale rapidly with the approach we have taken towards machine learning and generative AI. There are opportunities for AI, but you can’t use AI for everything, and that approach will not help our customers.”
He pointed to the recently completed acquisition of intelligent enterprise asset management (EAM) company Copperleaf as a key strategic move for IFS’ AI offer. “We’ve always been good on the operational side, but their technology [which is said to manage $2 trillion of critical assets held by companies] is going to bring faster decision making and better business planning. And that tech can be applied across our products.”
So, what were the main new AI features unveiled at IFS Unleashed?
A big portion were around the updated IFS Cloud. The firm unveiled new IFS.ai-powered features in the IFS Cloud 24R2 release, focusing on “delivering maximum value” to asset and service-intensive industries, and “elevating the user experience” to drive industrial AI adoption at scale.
Highlights included Home, a new, “dynamic”, AI-powered homepage for IFS Cloud, providing live project status visibility, “fuelling productivity and efficiency”. Anomalies are automatically detected, and corrective actions suggested, saving time and increasing accuracy of project analysis.
“This unique and intuitive experience combines the new context aware IFS.ai Copilot use cases with a growing ecosystem of interactive widgets, that help users plan, manage, build and service assets faster, smarter and safer,” said the firm.
In addition, IFS.ai Copilot is now said to go “deeper than ever”, surfacing insights from across the organisation. The context aware Copilot has been preconfigured with industries capabilities, and is said to get “even more powerful” when integrated with customer data sources. And it knows where users are in IFS Cloud, providing accurate insights related to that.
Also, within the Asset Applications module, the new IFS.ai Copilot for FMECA (Failure Modes, Effects, Criticality Analysis) feature is said to drive optimised asset availability, while reducing maintenance costs and mitigating risks. It provides detailed analysis of how an asset might fail, and the probability, and consequences, of making or adjusting maintenance strategies. AI supports FMECA by unlocking insights from unstructured information, such as manuals and maintenance reports, to support and refine the analysis.
And new Prompt Libraries in Copilot empower users to take the lead with AI by storing contextually relevant prompts, eliminating repetition and boosting productivity.
As an example in how IFS.ai can improve operations now, it can take unstructured data from a new manufacturing customer PO, and auto create a new order so the production process can be accelerated. The impact of this new order onto the shop floor can then be modelled and analysed with the new Manufacturing Scheduling Optimization (MSO) Simulation capability.
“IFS.ai does the heavy lifting, enabling production managers to improve capacity planning and meet customer demand,” said IFS. “Meanwhile, asset managers can use the Simulation capabilities to more accurately predict and plan essential asset maintenance based on different scenarios.”
In a separate announcement, among a number of others covering new customers and business operations, enterprise asset management software provider IFS Ultimo has integrated AI functionality into its next-generation EAM platform, to “enhance troubleshooting”, and enable organisations to reduce the mean time to repair (MTTR) of their assets.
By leveraging AI, EAM toolsets will be more intuitive, accessible and predictive, said IFS, therefore driving efficiency and effectiveness in asset management practices.
“AI will take EAM to the next level. Our vision for AI is to focus on real world use cases,” said Chris van den Belt, head of product management at IFS Ultimo. “When considering what AI to integrate into our platform, we are only embedding features which will add significant value for our customers and improve their user experience.”
IFS says many AI technologies are geared towards predicting and preventing failures and incidents. However, for the majority of organisations, it says, these technologies are more of a long-term goal than a short-term reality.
Reactive maintenance, it adds, will continue to feature prominently in most organisations’ maintenance strategies. “With this in mind, IFS Ultimo has made the conscious decision to harness the powers of AI to significantly reduce time spent on reactive maintenance.
“Realising these short-term benefits starting today puts long-term objectives within arm's reach.”
Forget the AI hype, this is probably the way it should be.
