IFS has acquired TheLoops. With this acquisition, it plans to launch the first AI agent platform for industrial applications.
IFS hopes to provide customers with “intelligent digital teammates” in an industrial setting, a more demanding and error-prone task than many other agentic AI implementations. These agents would not only understand the nature of an industry and company, but according to IFS, they could also participate in real enterprise workflows alongside human colleagues. They adhere to customer-defined security, data access, and compliance standards—a significant promise.
TheLoops provides a solution that aims to streamline operational tasks, increase capacity, and allow employees to perform valuable tasks where unnecessary manual work is currently required.
Strategic change of course at IFS
According to IFS CEO Mark Moffat, AI offers many opportunities for critical industries, but it’s all about structuring. With TheLoops, the company can move from enterprise software that tracks work to software that actually performs work.
The collaboration with the acquired TheLoops team should result in AI agents that understand the complexity of industrial environments. Think about what work needs to be done, how it should be done, and how it can be done safely and at scale. The multi-agent platform is composable and aware of the context provided by the operational environment.
Notable change
The industrial side of this acquisition comes entirely from IFS. Visitors to TheLoops’ website will mainly see similarities with the type of agentic AI we are already more familiar with. Think of AI to support customer service or automate office tasks. So it could take a while before TheLoops is truly “IFS-native,” so to speak. It is also uncertain whether TheLoops’ solutions that fall outside IFS’s core business will still be offered after the acquisition is complete. In any case, TheLoops itself promises to be turnkey for customers; the question is whether the same applies to the party that bought it.
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