27 June 2025

In a strategic move set to reshape the industrial AI landscape, IFS, the global leader in enterprise cloud and Industrial AI software, has acquired TheLoops, a Silicon Valley-based innovator in autonomous AI agent technology. With this acquisition, IFS becomes the first vendor to deliver an Agentic AI platform purpose-built for mission-critical industrial assets and processes — a major step toward autonomous enterprise operations.

The acquisition signals a significant acceleration in IFS’s vision to integrate more intelligent, context-aware automation across the operational backbone of asset-intensive industries such as manufacturing, energy, aerospace & defense, and utilities.

---

Why It Matters: From Predictive to Agentic

While AI has long been applied in industrial settings for predictive maintenance, anomaly detection, and decision support, the next frontier is agentic AI — systems that can not only recommend actions but act autonomously on behalf of humans, within clearly defined boundaries.

This is where TheLoops comes in. Founded by former executives from AppDynamics, SAP, and Cisco, TheLoops has developed an agentic platform capable of real-time decision-making, self-learning, and workflow orchestration using contextual data across systems. Their technology has already been applied in customer support and service automation, where it enabled AI agents to diagnose issues, triage cases, and resolve them independently or in collaboration with human agents.

By embedding TheLoops' capabilities into its Industrial AI portfolio, IFS now has the foundation for a domain-specific agentic platform that understands not just data, but industrial context — from asset health to service schedules and compliance workflows.

---

Built for Industry: The First Agentic Platform with a Mission-Critical Focus

The combined platform will enable IFS customers to deploy autonomous AI agents that can monitor, reason, and act on operational data across maintenance, field service, asset management, and production workflows. This opens the door to:

• Autonomous service dispatching

• Self-healing maintenance protocols

• Dynamic supply chain interventions

• Human-in-the-loop compliance automation

By grounding these agents in IFS’s mature product suite — which includes Enterprise Asset Management (EAM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), and Field Service Management (FSM) — the agents inherit industrial-grade reliability and domain knowledge. That’s a differentiator few competitors can match.

---

IFS’s Growth Strategy: AI as a Core Value Driver

The acquisition aligns with IFS’s aggressive growth strategy to become the definitive platform for Industrial AI in the cloud. Under CEO Mark Moffat, the company has expanded its footprint rapidly across EMEA and North America, growing its cloud business by double digits and securing flagship clients across energy, aerospace, telecom, and infrastructure.

Key to this growth is IFS’s investment in intelligent automation and industry-specific AI. Earlier moves included deeper integration of machine learning in IFS Cloud and acquisitions like Poka (connected worker tech) and Axios Systems (ITSM). Now, with TheLoops, IFS steps into the agentic future — where AI doesn’t just analyze but acts.

---

The Emerging Market for Agentic AI in Industry

Agentic AI represents a natural evolution from today’s “assistive AI” toward systems that operate with minimal human intervention in complex environments. In industrial contexts, this means AI agents that:

• Coordinate asset inspections based on sensor anomalies

• Reorder spare parts autonomously

• Escalate and reroute tasks in real time

• Ensure compliance through live documentation and reporting

The industrial sector is ripe for such innovation. As companies grapple with aging assets, workforce shortages, and the pressure to digitally transform operations, the demand for AI that can do, not just suggest is rapidly increasing.

Analysts estimate that the market for industrial AI — including agentic capabilities — could surpass $20 billion by 2030, as manufacturers and asset operators seek higher levels of automation, uptime, and resilience.

---

The Vision Ahead

By combining IFS’s deep domain expertise and industrial-grade platforms with TheLoops’ AI agent engine, the company is betting on a future where AI becomes a co-pilot, not just an assistant, in managing the world’s most complex operational systems.

IFS’s CEO Mark Moffat has consistently framed the company’s mission as delivering “Moments of Service” — ensuring that every customer touchpoint, every asset deployment, and every business outcome is optimized. With autonomous AI agents in the mix, those moments could soon be predictive, proactive, and self-orchestrated.

TheLoops’ team will join IFS to help accelerate the integration and rollout of these capabilities, with a focus on real-time, intelligent automation that understands enterprise context — from service contracts to IoT telemetry.