Podcast: Why IFS Loops Is Accelerating Autonomous Workflows on the Plant Floor

Now, we do understand AI is not perfect, so there are always exceptions. So, how you do exception handling is also something we do as part of the agentic platform. So it's not just about deploying these digital workers, but also: how do you monitor them? How do you create an audit trail? When handling exceptions—just like a human on the job—how do you retrain them? All those factors are provided out of the box today.

TW: It's different than just tracking down Joe or Jane on the floor who put the wrong lube in the bearing, right? It's a whole new frontier when it comes to addressing AI traceability.

SK: Exactly. And that's what is the key aspect of industrial-grade solutions, right? Because these are deployed in highly regulated environments, you want to make sure that there is an audit trail for everything that the AI is doing. So as part of the platform, we do have a supervisor platform—a supervisor agent—for every digital worker that keeps the audit trail and monitors. And we leave it up to you to do the change-management aspect of it, rather than just saying, "Oh, this is coming from a plain automation," which is very static in nature.

TW: In your relationship with IFS—I know it’s fairly longstanding—but the formal acquisition took place earlier this year, like June or July, correct?

SK: That was June, yes.

TW: How did your companies get to know each other better, and then what led to the acquisition? How has that been going?

SK: IFS was a customer of Loops before the acquisition. They actually bought us in the CX space as an agentic solution to help optimize their support operations. Soon enough, they started digging deeper, and they’re like, "Oh, we're fishing for some agentic solution in the market," and they had conversations, and this seemed like the perfect marriage, because we were moving out from the CX operations into other operations that we wanted to get into. And because of the platform approach that we had taken, where we were not just a platform to build agents but also to monitor, test, deploy, version, and handle security and governance, that really attracted them to us, and that’s where the marriage happened.

Now, how is it going? It’s actually going really well. We've just been, what, 120 days in? We have a few customers live in production in the industrial space, using the digital workers that we launched out-of-the-box, and actually scaling to everything else. So it's quite fascinating. And we did have our first customer on stage who actually articulated the value—what was it? They went live in seven weeks using Material Replenisher, and that is getting them $3 million in cost savings and 90,000 hours saved.

SA: That's a lot of money. It sounds like you're in the honeymoon period to me.

TW: Well, the savings were located in the time saved by the technicians who didn't have to look for the correct parts, right? Yep. At this point, it always seems like the first part of ROI that's found is with the frontline employees who aren't slowed down anymore by either surprise interruptions to the production line or time spent looking for parts. I mean, did this surprise you at all, or was this exactly where you and the customers looked to generate savings?

SK: The reason why we picked these digital workers to begin with is also, you know, it depends on the process where you can show the buck for the money fast, right? Because you’ve got to bring people along. This is not here to replace human beings—I want to be clear on that—but it is to really amplify the ability of what you can scale and do a lot more with less.

So when Pedro came and said, "This material replenisher is a big pain point. Most of my technicians know the parts, but it's actually at that 3 a.m. in the night when they can't physically call a supply chain manager to get the part ID, and he has to wait, or she has to wait for four hours to make that happen. It's a huge loss of money for me. So how can I create a frictionless operational experience for my field technicians, who are doing the hardest job, the dirtiest job, and make life easy for them?"

So that kind of drove this digital worker for Pedro to a point that now he wants to jump into the customer order, into the supplier order, into inventory replenisher—and each one of them are building blocks for the next operational step. And at the end of the day, unlike our FPA systems, these agents will talk to each other. So you're creating a network of them within your environment for operational efficiency.