IFS Built Working Prototypes With Customers In 48 Hours During Orlando Conference

The closing session of the IFS Unleashed 2026 conference in Orlando took an unusual approach: rather than scripted product demonstrations, IFS put live prototypes on stage that had been built with customers during the conference itself, some just hours before the presentation.

IFS Senior Vice President of Global Industries and Solutions, James Greaves, opened with a confession.

“When Mark stood up on this stage on Tuesday and spoke about the 40 per cent, I didn’t actually know specifically what we were talking about in this session,” Greaves admitted to the audience. “That is a risk. Some might say stupid. You’ll be the judge.”

The decision not to script the session, he explained, was deliberate. The audience spanned heavy manufacturing, aerospace, supply chain management, asset management and finance, each with different processes and challenges.

“What you’re about to see isn’t just a vision of the future. It’s some of the real work that happened over the last couple of days, and we are here to celebrate that,” Greaves told the crowd.

Three Days, 3,000 Conversations

Greaves shared the numbers from the conference’s hands-on engagement with IFS Intelligence, the company’s AI platform. From a standing start, attendees had approximately 3,000 conversations with the system, completed over 2,000 demonstrations and – the figure Greaves appeared most struck by – finished 114 deep-dive collaborative sessions where IFS teams built directly alongside customers.

“We’ve never seen demand like this before,” he noted.

Keeping IMAX Running Across 90 Countries

The first live case study came from an unplanned source. Greaves revealed that the company featured had not known it would be on stage that week.

IMAX, the cinema technology company, maintains roughly 1,800 custom-built systems across more than 90 countries – more countries than Starbucks has locations, its representative pointed out. Each system comes with a guarantee that IMAX will maintain it at the same level across its entire lifespan, typically 10 to 15 years.

The complexity behind that guarantee is considerable. IMAX operates 18 depots globally to service those systems. When a problem arises, the company must coordinate three things simultaneously: the right part from the right depot (with geopolitical shipping restrictions meaning a part cannot always be sent from the nearest location), a technician with the correct skills and appropriate visa for the destination country, and access to the building where the theatre is housed – buildings owned by exhibitor partners such as AMC.

“We have a really, really high percentage of uptime – 99.97 per cent thereabouts,” the IMAX representative explained. “But that’s not good enough, because nobody wants to disappoint on the premiere of an event.”

The company’s service level agreement calls for 24 to 40 hours to resolve issues, and every hour of downtime means empty seats.

During the conference, IFS teams connected to IMAX’s environment and built a prototype that brought together field service data with the company’s existing back-office system to provide unified visibility and smarter decision-making for its network operations centres in China and Toronto.

“If we had the dollars behind it built into a tool like that, then it could allow us to make better decisions, not only meet our SLA but also go after that 40 per cent that we’ve been hearing about,” the IMAX representative remarked.

A Week’s Work In 20 Minutes

Greaves shared three additional anecdotes from the conference floor, each illustrating a different type of problem IFS Intelligence addressed in real time.

The first involved a supply chain director who had never had full visibility across their supply chain. After connecting to their environment, IFS delivered that visibility. The director’s first reaction, according to Greaves, was that they had been waiting their entire career for it. Their second request was to go back in time and undo decisions they would not have made with that information available.

The second case involved a team that had spent the week before the conference building a complex report – described by Greaves as resembling a large pivot table. Within 20 minutes using IFS Intelligence, the report was completed to a higher standard. Greaves noted the team’s reaction was colourful enough that he could not repeat the specific language on stage, but the sentiment translated to getting a week of their lives back.

The third case provided what Greaves called a “plot twist.” A project business approached IFS complaining that their suppliers were consistently late. After connecting to their environment, the actual finding was that the procurement team had not entered any lead time information into the system. The suppliers were late because the system had no data against which to measure or plan. IFS Intelligence fixed the data, the process was corrected and, as Greaves put it, the project team could now complain about their suppliers for entirely new reasons.

Deloitte And PwC Named Early Access Partners

Greaves announced that both Deloitte and PwC would serve as early access partners for IFS Intelligence.

James Haunty from Deloitte joined the stage to describe what the consulting firm had built during the conference. In a matter of days, the Deloitte team constructed a use case for predictive and condition-based maintenance of substation transformers.

The prototype brought together sensor data, waveform data from relay systems, inspection data, oil quality data and work history from disparate sources.

“Our clients can do this today, but it’s very manual. It’s very hard. It’s very possible to miss the key insight,” Haunty explained.

He identified three core benefits: enabling utilities to take assets out of service less frequently, improving overall system reliability to keep equipment running and delivering power, and providing evidence to regulatory commissions that the utility is making progress and saving customers money.

The plan going forward, he indicated, is to continuously improve the transformer use case and then roll it out to other asset classes including transmission circuit breakers, distribution circuit breakers, reclosers and underground transformers.

Oil And Gas: $5 Million A Year From Faster Decisions

Mike Scheller from PwC – who recounted arriving at the conference after a rejected takeoff and a rebooking onto a Southwest flight the day before – brought an oil and gas perspective.

He described the challenge facing lease operators, each of whom is typically responsible for 75 to 100 wells and must make daily decisions about keeping production flowing.

“Each one of them is responsible for somewhere between 75 and 100 wells. They have to go around and make decisions to keep those things flowing every day, or the money stops,” Scheller told the audience.

The prototype built during the conference combined real-time sensor data, transaction data, work histories and production rates to help operators decide when to break their routine schedule to address an emerging issue and when to stay the course.

He put specific numbers on the value. The typical time to make a complex breaking decision is roughly three days. Using what was built in IFS Intelligence, that can be brought inside a single day. For a typical mature well producing 500 barrels per day, a day of downtime costs approximately $50,000. Accelerating just one such decision per year across an operator’s portfolio translates to roughly $5 million in annual value.

“We know that there’s way more than one of these happening for our operator plans,” Scheller added.

From Zero To Solving Problems In 14 Hours

Greaves closed the session by highlighting the speed at which IFS Intelligence was moving from demonstration to deployment. He cited one example where the platform was launched on Tuesday and was already operating in a customer environment and solving problems 14 hours later.

“That 40 per cent that’s locked in your organisations doesn’t unlock itself,” Greaves told the audience, referring to IFS’s claim that 40 per cent of enterprise data remains untapped by conventional systems.

Last Updated on October 21, 2026 by Nick Ross