In an industry known for cautious adoption and protracted timelines, IFS is opting for speed. That was the underlying message from CEO Mark Moffat and CPO Christian Pedersen during their open Q&A session at IFS Connect UKI 2025 in Birmingham, UK. With the launch of Nexus Black, a rapid-response AI innovation arm, and a clear ambition to double its valuation every three years, IFS is not just talking about AI—it’s productizing it, scaling it, and pushing it deep into core industries.
“Our job is to help industrial companies bring AI out of the lab and into their supply chains, turbines, aircraft, and field teams,” said Moffat. “That’s the only AI that matters.”
The company’s renewed focus on agentic AI—self-directed systems that operate across workflows—is paired with a candid acknowledgment that not every use case will scale. But IFS is betting that many will. By threading bespoke customer challenges through a platform lens, the company intends to spin real-world solutions into its IFS Cloud product for repeatable enterprise value.
Where many vendors come at AI from the outside-in—building integrations or wrappers around legacy ERP—IFS is taking an inside-out approach. With a single data model and highly composable platform, IFS Cloud acts as both system of record and system of intelligence. That positioning is deliberate.
“We’re transacting the core: finance, supply chain, asset, people,” said Pedersen. “That gives us the context and the responsibility to orchestrate the broader enterprise AI ecosystem.”
This is especially important in IFS’s six target sectors—manufacturing, aerospace & defense, energy & utilities, construction & engineering, telecom, and service—where mission-critical systems cannot afford errors. IFS’s approach allows for embedded approvals, human-in-the-loop oversight, and open interoperability with third-party AI tools and standards.
IFS isn’t short on ambition. Following a recapitalization that valued the business at €15 billion, the company is targeting $27 billion in enterprise value by 2027. It currently schedules over 400,000 service technicians daily with its AI-driven PSO engine, and AI accounts for 14% of total company revenue—a rare level of monetized maturity.
“We’re growing 20% organically, with win rates over 55% against SAP, Oracle, and IBM,” Moffat said. “And we’re not the cheapest—we just deliver faster.”
Yet, the leadership also stressed patience and partnership. They recognize that industrial AI cannot be commoditized overnight, nor should it be rushed. The goal is to offer practical tools—like AI-based supplier change notifications and logbook automation in aviation—that evolve with real-world constraints, not against them.
What this means for ERP Insiders
If you’re in an asset-intensive industry, lean in. For organizations in asset- and field-intensive sectors, the path forward is clear: start embedding AI now, but do it inside core processes, not as side experiments. Focus on high-friction pain points—scheduling, asset downtime, procurement—and bring those into the Nexus Black framework if your organization is IFS-aligned. Design for scale from day one. Use IFS’s extensibility framework to futureproof any custom work, and treat data ownership and governance as central design principles, not afterthoughts.
Look for architectural and operational advantages from IFS. IFS’s differentiators are more than architecture—they are operational. Its single data model, composability, and embedded AI make it one of the few ERP platforms where agents can act autonomously with full business context. PSO, Nexus Black, and IFS.ai are fully integrated—not layered—and now available in both IFS Industrial Cloud and customer-controlled environments. The extensibility framework allows domain-specific innovations to be maintained outside the core without breaking updates, enabling innovation with continuity.
Sound fundamentals and relentless focus spur IFS growth path. IFS’s inside-out AI model, speed-to-value execution, and sector-specific focus set it apart from horizontal ERP giants and AI-only vendors alike. The industrial ERP market is expected to exceed $100 billion by 2030, and IFS is uniquely positioned with both product-market fit and a go-to-market model grounded in customer intimacy. If it maintains its 20%+ growth rate, delivers on Nexus Black’s productization promises, and expands its ecosystem, IFS could credibly claim leadership in industrial enterprise software by the end of the decade—especially as vertical depth trumps breadth in the AI era.
