Conference Presentation, Panel
Fireside Chat with Mark Moffat, CEO of IFS | RAISE Summit 2026
- IFS Strategic Positioning & History: IFS, a global leader in industrial AI with over 40 years of history, focuses on capital-intensive, asset-heavy industries (utilities, manufacturing, aerospace, defense, mining, oil & gas) to support the 96% of the world's workforce not seated behind desks.
- CEO Background & Culture: CEO Mark Moffat, who has led the company for two and a half years, applies a 24-year services background to IFS, emphasizing that value delivery is the sole criteria for retaining customers and correcting operational errors.
- Industrial AI Differentiation: Unlike AI's rapid adoption in software engineering and support functions, industrial AI penetration is lower due to the highly complex, physical nature of value chains; IFS focuses on "forward-deployed engineering" to identify specific pinch points and optimization leakage in real-world environments.
- Financial Performance: The company reports a 96% Gross Retention Rate (GRR), attributing its success to an obsessive focus on solving customer problems rather than just providing software features.
- High-Stakes Proving Ground: Industries served, such as commercial aviation, operate where failure is not an option (requiring 99.99999% reliability), necessitating a hybrid approach combining probabilistic AI optimization with deterministic safety standards; IFS technology currently underpins 100% of US commercial aviation flights, serving 800 million passengers annually.
- Quantifiable Customer Success (Grant Distillery):
- Scenario: A new distillery on Scotland's west coast experienced significant unplanned downtime despite being one of the most advanced manufacturing sites globally.
- Solution: IFS integrated design, engineering, PLM, schematics, and telematics data to predict failures based on flow rates, temperature, throughput, and gas volume.
- Outcome: Achieved a 38% reduction in downtime.
- Deployment Speed: The AI integration moved from initial conversation to contract signature in 8 days, leveraging pre-existing trust and on-site proof-of-concept development.
- Adoption Strategy for Clients: Leaders should prioritize identifying fundamental business pinch points (profitability, performance deviations) and solve for economic drivers first, rather than adopting "AI for AI's sake."
- Sovereign AI Architecture: To mitigate risks of frontier model access curtailment, IFS employs an agnostic, multi-layered supply chain strategy that includes:
- Proliferation of closed, frontier, and open-source models.
- Deployment of lower-parameter models at the edge within client environments.
- Integration of robotics and ecosystem partnerships to ensure operational continuity regardless of political or national security shifts.
- Future Industry Impact: Manufacturing is identified as the sector most likely to be fundamentally transformed, specifically regarding global supply chain orchestration (production, materials, logistics, and fulfillment), though adoption faces hurdles in highly conservative, 5-to-10-year funding cycle industries like utilities.
- Five-Year Outlook: While AI terminology will likely disappear in favor of "intelligent software" and headless, agentic architectures, the fundamental need for precision, rigor, and robust underlying value tracking in enterprise systems will remain unchanged.