AI is so hot, it’s now a major source of revenue to run a country in the Caribbean. The government of Anguilla has just partnered with global provider of top-level domains Identity Digital to help “protect, expand and sustain” its widely popular domain name, “.ai”.
With 20% of the country’s revenue having come from this domain in 2023 alone, the government has planned investments back into the community, including expanding the airport, improving its technology vocational centre, and enhancing elder healthcare.
That’s some good AI news, and business software specialist IFS wants to create plenty more, when its comes to its industrial software partners and customers.
It is currently holding its IFS Unleashed 24 partner and customer event in Orlando, attended by IT Europa. It is encouraging its 400 partners to now grab the opportunities being offered by AI in the six industrial sectors it continues to specialise in: aerospace and defence, construction and engineering, energy utilities and resources, manufacturing, service industries, and telecoms.
IFS is providing a roadmap of products and upgrades around AI that are being launched, and will be launched through 2025. The areas of AI that IFS says partners and customers should be focusing on are: content generation, recommendations, contextual knowledge, forecasting and simulation, optimisation, and anomaly detection.
Newish IFS CEO Mark Moffat (pictured), who got promoted to the position at the beginning of this year, was on hand to rally the troops at the conference this morning. “The next industrial revolution is industrial AI, and that will be IFS.ai. We can watch all this AI activity around us, or we can run towards it, and that’s what Unleashed 24 is all about.”
Day 1 today is all about “unleashing innovation” led by presentations from existing IFS customers, Day 2, Wednesday is focusing on “your AI blueprint”, with Day 3 Thursday promising “frictionless transformation”.
“IFS being the undisputed vendor for industrial AI is our target. We already have 314,682 women and men managed by our AI capabilities in the field, for instance,” said Moffat, seemingly proud to give out such a precise number.
“We serve six core industries, while the competition may serve 30, but our core efforts mean we can focus on industrial AI. We are not about disappearing for years, after selling subscription licenses to you, we are about being a partner that is always there.
“Ecosystems are transactional, but communities like we have do things together,” Moffat chipped in.
At the beginning of his tenure, Moffat said he set out to meet 100 customers in 100 days, a task he said was completed. He learnt that customers wanted IFS to be “close, responsive, and on hand to meet their needs”, and that as it grew, they didn’t want it to “become bloated and lazy”.
He said IFS had increased its product development and R&D activities funds, since he started, and was allowing customers to track their returns on investment from IFS software over one-, two-, three-, four-, and five-year periods using special tools. “No one else does this,” he claimed.
As mentioned, IFS wants to be the leading vendor in industrial AI, and a prime target is to have “100% penetration in the top three industries we are in”, said Moffat. “If we managed this, and by using AI, we believe we can reduce total global carbon emissions by 2.6%.
“If we can do this with our customers, and other [competitor] companies do the same, imagine the effect we could have on industry?”
Moffat added IFS was now investing more in “partner innovation” around the IFS Cloud, as “we can’t do all this ourself”. IFS cloud services are delivered through the Microsoft Azure cloud, and a video discussion on AI between Moffat and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, previously recorded, was presented to the IFS crowd.
More to follow from IFS Unleashed...
