IFS Ultimo adds digital labor to org chart, EAM system
The EAM vendor is building out a digital workforce at 'light speed' to become an AI-first business. It also wants to help customers move in a similar direction.
Enterprise asset management vendor IFS Ultimo is making an operational shift to become an AI-first business where agents work alongside humans and appear as digital labor on organizational charts.
But the blending of digital and human labor on the org chart is not for internal purposes only. In addition to using AI agents to improve efficiency and cut costs for internal processes, the company is building agentic and generative AI into its EAM product functionality.
Business and technology evolution is nothing new for IFS Ultimo, which started in 1988 as a manufacturing consulting business for the markets in Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. The company, based in Nunspeet in the Netherlands, moved into the EAM software business, becoming a major player primarily in Germany and the U.K.
In 2022, Ultimo was acquired by IFS, which provides ERP, EAM and field service management functionality for the manufacturing industry.
IFS and its financial backers EQT started to inject capital into the Ultimo business to drive organic growth into larger markets such as North America and inorganic growth through acquisitions, as well as platform and product development, according to Steven Elsham, CEO of IFS Ultimo.
Steven Elsham
Elsham was brought in to run IFS Ultimo in May this year and tasked with driving company growth as well as evolving its direction.
"The most important thing is our change in focus from being an EAM provider of a system of record to moving toward being a provider of digital labor in the EAM market, who also happens to have its own system of record," he said.
IFS Ultimo is building a new AI-centric product portfolio around digital labor, but it is also moving at "light speed" to embed agentic AI capabilities into the way the business runs, Elsham said.
"We will become an AI-first business, which means that we have an org chart where we have human workers on it, but we also have our digital labor co-workers on there as well," he said. "We have a series of internal systems that have now been either augmented with AI or we have created new agentic systems which have replaced things that human workers used to do."
The rise of digital labor
IFS Ultimo is joining a growing list of organizations that are incorporating AI agents into the everyday workforce.
At least one-third to one-half of enterprise cloud CRM heavyweight Salesforce's operations are now conducted using agentic AI, CEO Marc Benioff claimed. Banking giant BNY is now delegating some tasks such as code writing and validating payment instructions to AI agents that are embedded into specific teams.
Organizations will need to be able to absorb not just new technology -- which they can do quite quickly -- but a new way of thinking and working. We need to go to where the puck is moving, rather than to where it is now.
Steven ElshamCEO, IFS Ultimo
However, the adoption of digital labor in the manufacturing industry is challenging, as it requires a new way of thinking in a market that has not always been at the cutting edge of innovation, according to Elsham.
"Organizations will need to be able to absorb not just new technology -- which they can do quite quickly -- but a new way of thinking and working," he said. "We need to go to where the puck is moving, rather than to where it is now."
IFS Ultimo is deploying digital labor in finance, HR and sales operations first. The goal is not to reduce head count as much as it is to carve out new responsibilities such as agent manager, according to Elsham.
"That's fueling the innovation to enable us to operate much more leanly, but also much more quickly," he said.
In IFS Ultimo's operations in Sri Lanka, for example, the company would typically offshore certain back-office or finance functions to lower-cost areas, Elsham said. But as costs began to rise, the company began relying on AI agents instead.
"We challenge them to re-create their role in agentic form, and they will be the manager of those agents," he said. "When you've done that, you've basically got a job for life with us, because you're incredibly useful to us, and we're embedding that more and more."
The employees are using general AI tools such as Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT Enterprise to develop agents, as well as third-party AI software such as Luminance, a legal tool to assess contracts and assist in contract negotiations. The company's R&D team also uses Lovable and Cursor AI for product development, while its finance department relies on Lucanet for financial planning.
However, Elsham acknowledged that this speed and uncertainty of the transition is unnerving to many people in the organization.
"I'm telling them that this is business as usual, this isn't a one-off project," he said. "This is the way a modern business needs to operate in order to compete effectively against your competitors and serve the needs of an ever-more-demanding client base."
IFS Ultimo is no longer only competing against traditional EAM vendors, but also against customer expectations, which are being set by every other system they use in their business.
"We've got to measure up against that standard, rather than our competitors' standards, and we're transforming our business from the inside out to become a proper AI-first business," Elsham said. "This is not just about the product we sell -- it's about how we operate the business."
Jim O'Donnell is a news director for Informa TechTarget who covers ERP and other enterprise applications.
Steven Elsham
