Every year, thousands of senior business leaders from across industries visit Microsoft’s regional Experience Centers in Munich, Silicon Valley, and Singapore. These invitation-only centers showcase real-world examples of AI transformation in action, helping executives understand how innovation can be translated into measurable business outcomes.

Only a select number of Microsoft customers and partners are featured within these centers. IFS is now one of them, with an Industrial AI showcase represented across all three regions.

I am proud that IFS has been trusted to demonstrate Industrial AI in front of the leaders responsible for turning AI ambition into operational reality. It is a strong reflection of the maturity of our technology, the strength of our relationship with Microsoft, and the relevance of IFS to the critical industries that keep the world running.

That’s not a marketing milestone. It’s a signal about where Industrial AI has reached and what it takes to demonstrate it credibly to the executives who must act on it.

The problem that makes this conversation urgent

Unplanned downtime costs large manufacturers upwards of $500,000 per hour. In some sectors, the figure is closer to $1 million. For decades, the response was reactive: wait for failure, then fix it. That approach is no longer acceptable, commercially, operationally, or in terms of safety.

The question C-suite leaders are now asking isn’t whether AI can help. It’s which AI is ready to deploy in environments where failure has real consequences.

What the Microsoft Experience Centers showcase

Microsoft Experience Centers are invitation-only environments. The executives who visit them are evaluating real-world examples of AI-led transformation— not concepts, not roadmaps.

Photo files available here Inside each center, visitors encounter an immersive scenario demonstrating IFS’s industrial AI capabilities built around a critical packaging line. An anomaly surfaces. Before a human touches the service request, an autonomous IFS Digital Worker is already working: analyzing sensor data, cross-referencing maintenance records, triaging the issue, optimizing the schedule, dispatching the right technician, forecasting the parts needed for a first-time fix, and guiding the repair in real time. Every insight feeds back into the system to help prevent the same failure occurring again.

That scenario runs consistently across Munich, Silicon Valley, and Singapore, managed and delivered by Microsoft.

Crucially, this is not a prototype. It reflects what IFS customers are deploying today.

Why IFS, and why now

IFS serves the 70% of the global workforce that operates outside traditional office environments: the engineers, technicians, and operators managing critical assets across energy, manufacturing, defense, utilities, and aerospace. These are the people and organizations for whom reliability, safety, and uptime are not performance metrics but operational requirements.

IFS Cloud unifies ERP, Enterprise Asset Management, and Field Service Management on a single platform, with IFS.ai embedded throughout. The Industrial AI strategy operates across three dimensions. Embedded AI applies intelligence directly inside operational workflows, where the work actually happens. Digital Workers are agentic AI that autonomously execute time-critical tasks at scale, without waiting for human intervention. And Nexus Black accelerates targeted AI capabilities for defined industrial use cases, moving faster where the need is most specific.

IFS Cloud runs natively on Microsoft Azure, with AI capabilities built directly on Azure OpenAI, Microsoft Fabric, and Microsoft Teams. It is also available through the Microsoft Commercial Marketplace.

What the partnership reflects

Industrial AI is reshaping how the world manages its most critical infrastructure, and the partnerships behind it determine how fast that change reaches the industries that need it most. Together with Microsoft, we are driving real, measurable impact across the sectors that power the global economy.

Microsoft’s Sandy Gupta, Vice President of the Global ISV Ecosystem, said: “IFS brings the deep industrial expertise and proven execution that make those conversations tangible, helping customers understand what Industrial AI looks like when it’s ready for enterprise scale.”

That last phrase matters. Enterprise scale isn’t just about volume. It’s about operating in complex, regulated, asset-intensive environments where the cost of getting it wrong is high. The selection by Microsoft reflects confidence that IFS delivers in exactly those conditions.

Turning AI ambition into operational reality

The gap between AI ambition and AI execution is where most industrial organizations are currently stuck. The technology exists. The use cases are understood. What’s missing is the confidence to commit, and the evidence that it works in practice.

The Microsoft Experience Centers exist precisely to close that gap. And IFS’s inclusion as a hero Industrial AI showcase means that when the world’s most senior enterprise leaders look for proof, IFS is the example in the room.

To learn more about IFS at Microsoft Experience Centers, visit: Microsoft Experience Centers