IFS rolls TheLoops agentic AI into industrial ERP

IFS is adding AI agent development and management capabilities to its ERP platform with the acquisition of software startup TheLoops, filling a gap in its capabilities and enabling customers to build autonomous AI workflows.

The acquisition brings TheLoops’ full Agent Development life cycle (ADLC) platform into IFS, enabling enterprises to design, test, deploy, monitor, and fine-tune AI agents with built-in support for versioning, compliance, and performance optimization, Somya Kapoor, CEO of TheLoops, told CIO.com.

She said it also offers a multi-agent building capability that enterprises can use to perform complex tasks or workflows by collaborating with internal and external agents with support from interoperability frameworks such as MCP and A2A.

The agentic capabilities of TheLoops are similar to those of Salesforce’s Agentforce offering, which was recently updated to support MCP and simplify the agent building, monitoring, and optimization process.

Other enterprise software vendors including SAP and ServiceNow have continued to add agentic AI capabilities to their platforms over the last few months.

Offering a glimpse of how he thinks TheLoops could enhance IFS’s offerings, Moor Insights and Strategy principal analyst Robert Kramer said that the existing IFS.ai Copilot could be upgraded with agentic capabilities, transforming it from a reactive assistant into a proactive digital teammate capable of autonomous task execution.

“This would enable autonomous monitoring, predictive maintenance scheduling, and performance optimization across the asset portfolio in asset management operations,” Kramer said.

With the addition of TheLoops, IFS could emerge as one of the first vendors to provide an AI agentic platform for mission-critical industries, securing a competitive edge in the expanding enterprise agentic AI market, Kramer said.

But it’s not alone in pursuing this goal, said IDC research vice president Aly Pinder Jr: IFS’s competitors also have strategies tied to agentic AI and are making investments to enhance their respective capabilities either through organic growth or targeted acquisitions.

Supply chain management

Kramer suggested two areas where such capabilities would be useful: field service management and supply chain management.

“In field service orchestration, AI agents could handle complex field service scheduling, resource allocation, and customer communication workflows. Multi-agent systems could provide autonomous supply chain monitoring, risk assessment, and adaptive planning in supply chain intelligence,” he said.

The new features will be aimed at mid-market, asset-intensive enterprises with revenues between $100 million and $1 billion, particularly in regulated sectors such as manufacturing, energy, aerospace, defense, and healthcare, said Kramer.

“Key benefits of the new capabilities could include operational transformation, enhanced decision-making speed, workforce augmentation, scalable automation, and competitive differentiation,” he added.

TheLoops’ Kapoor gave further examples of how agents could enhance operations.

In manufacturing, for example, they could autonomously complete inventory replenishment, she said: “These agents can orchestrate smarter, more resilient supply networks, executing dozens of autonomous actions weekly to improve service continuity, optimize inventory, and free up teams for strategic planning.”

And in aircraft maintenance, an area where IFS has several customers, Kapoor said agents could play a role in part demand fulfillment. “With the automation of spare part transactions and the ability to respond across multiple channels — inventory, supply chain, borrowing — this agent transforms sourcing from reactive to responsive at scale. Across a fleet, small-time savings per event translates into substantial uptime recovery, smarter inventory utilization, and operational confidence,” she said.

Following the acquisition all TheLoops staff, including Kapoor, are expected to join IFS. Kapoor’s role there hasn’t been confirmed yet, an IFS spokesperson said.

The new capabilities and templatized agents are expected to be released in the fourth quarter of 2025, the IFS spokesperson added. The company hasn’t provided any details of pricing for the new capabilities.