Nexus Black from IFS: A Hands-on Approach for Helping Manufacturers Deploy AI, but Will Everyone Be Happy?

At its IFS Connect event in Birmingham, United Kingdom, on April 23, IFS (an enterprise cloud and industrial Artificial Intelligence (AI) software provider) announced the launch of IFS Nexus Black. Nexus Black is a mix of co-innovation with IFS staff collaborating with customers to develop AI-based solutions for their specific challenges. This enables customers to deploy AI-based solutions at scale in a matter of weeks, while incorporating the promising innovations into the IFS Industrial AI portfolio.

Nexus Black will be a separate unit staffed with product managers, AI engineers, solution architects, and User Experience (UX) specialists that have experienced delivering projects to industries that IFS engages with, including the manufacturing, aerospace and defense, energy utilities and resources, construction and engineering, telecommunications, and service industries.

Some examples of the type of projects include supporting predictive maintenance by using AI for anomaly detection, supporting automating scheduling, and/or developing contextual copilots for sales and service teams.

Nexus Black comes at a good time. Responses to online surveys conducted by ABI Research (see Industrial and Manufacturing Survey 2H 2024/1Q 2025: State of Play for Digital Transformation (PT-3657)) consistently show that Industrial and Manufacturing (I&M) firms are enthusiastic about the potential of AI to support their operations, but they lack the ability to fully grasp the potential of new technologies and how best to deploy them.

The operating environments for I&M firms are changing rapidly and now senior management teams, rather than just Information Technology (IT) or Operational Technology (OT) leads, need to articulate the firm’s AI strategy. Innovations must scale quickly and not be trapped in pilot purgatory. When using Nexus Black, engagements are resourced with multi-disciplinary teams and a pre-determined delivery model (Problem Definition, Proof of Value, Accelerated Development, and Digital Continuity), which should help keep projects on track.

One example could be developing and embedding copilots and Agentic AI solutions to support a manufacturer’s operations and workflows. The delivery team from Nexus Black would work with the customer to ensure data integrity, providing a governance framework and an implementation plan.

Nexus Black, however, is not just looking to provide innovative solutions to individual clients. Successful AI applications will be integrated into IFS Cloud and form part of the firm’s IFS Industrial AI portfolio.

Co-innovation is an interesting proposition. Due to their challenges around deploying technologies, I&M firms will welcome the opportunity to work with a vendor that will not only develop a solution, but also be there for the onboarding and scaling of the solution. The hands-on approach reinforces the point that digital transformation is not just about technology—working with users to embed the technology is just as important. In other words, seeking to align technology innovation and change management means that Nexus Black will be of interest to I&M firms that are struggling to utilize AI.

However, I&M firms often are cautious regarding AI due to the fact they don’t want their data to inform Large Language Models (LLMs) that will be used by competitors. Vendors at Hannover Messe 2025 emphasized the importance of transparency within solutions; more specifically, the authenticity of data used by AI applications. Furthermore, ABI Research expects that Nexus Black customers will negotiate an exclusivity period for “their solution” before the capabilities and use case are available more broadly.

The vendor landscape is evolving rapidly. Just 18 months ago, having a copilot as part of the solution was innovative, but today, it is the expectation. Nexus Black has the potential to help IFS rapidly deploy AI solutions and be seen as an innovative supplier that is competing with the likes of SAP, Oracle, and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Many of IFS’ partners were also in attendance at IFS Connect. IFS will need to ensure they are also involved at the appropriate time.