INDUSTRY News AI HELPS SOLVE INDUSTRIAL CHALLENGES ABB COLUMN
AI-DRIVEN ROBOTS OFFER THE FLEXIBILITY TO MEET SURGING DEMAND
It’s the time of year when retailers and fulfilment centres are bracing themselves for a surge of seasonal orders. Whether it’s Black Friday, Cyber Monday or the Christmas shopping period, the race to meet demand quickly, accurately and cost-effectively is on.
IFS launched IFS Intelligence at IFS Unleashed in Orlando earlier this month, a new product that collates data from across industrial operations (from assets, systems, processes) and turns it into meaningful action in minutes – creating value through new revenue streams and impactful operational efficiencies. IFS Intelligence performs work directly in the systems that
run physical operations. Built around everything the operation already knows – its assets, work orders, schedules, and history – it understands how that operation runs, working from live data across IFS and third-party systems, and acting only within the rules the business sets. Industrial organisations have learned to operate with lost capacity: unplanned downtime has a target, missed first-time fixes are built into service plans, and scrap has an allowance. Many of those losses trace back to the technology they run on: systems that do not talk to each other, screens that take months to learn, implementations that take years, and the spreadsheets and workarounds people build to bridge the gaps. IFS Intelligence is designed to close the gap between what an operation knows and what it can get done. While deeply rooted in complex workflows and industry-specific context, consumer-grade simplicity is built into the user experience, with governance and guardrails embedded. IFS Intelligence brings Industrial AI to the point of work: people in the field, on the plant floor, on a rig or in the office can ask questions in plain language through a single conversational interface. IFS Intelligence reasons across live operational data to explain what is happening and plan what should happen next, with the sources shown. It can then act on that plan, governed by the IFS Industrial AI Harness. Mark Moffat, CEO, IFS, commented: “We often see industrial
organisations operating at around 60% of their potential. The missing 40% is already inside the business. It sits in the expertise of the control room, the knowledge of the night shift, and the data spread across every system. IFS Intelligence brings all of it together and puts it to work. People can ask a question, take action, or hand a task to a digital worker, all within the rules, permissions, and approvals that govern their business. That is how industry closes the gap.”
www.ifs.com/en The traditional solution to such periods of peak demand is to
recruit temporary staff and ask existing staff to work overtime, but this can bring its own problems. Even if labour shortages don’t scupper recruitment plans entirely, temporary staff need rapid onboarding and training, and even the most enthusiastic workers will make more mistakes when they’re tired at the end of a long and busy shift. Worse still, these challenges will be cropping up at precisely the time when fulfilment centres need to be operating at the top of their game. Autonomous picking robots can instead help warehouses and logistics centres rise to the challenge of peak demand without creating workforce issues or productivity challenges. They can do so regardless of whether a surge is seasonal or entirely unexpected. Traditional, rules-based automation can be too rigid to adapt to changing requirements such as evolving product ranges, order profiles and workflows. Happily, the combination of machine vision and artificial intelligence (AI) has gifted robots with an unprecedented level of flexibility that means this is no longer an obstacle. AI-driven vision systems enable robots to identify and interpret a wide range of products and packages, so they can pick and place items flexibly without the need for human intervention. They offer consistent, tireless performance, limiting opportunities for human error and maintaining round-the-clock speed and accuracy. It’s not about replacing workers. It’s about freeing people up to carry out tasks where human judgement is more valuable. For example, one important function of an AI-driven system is to recognise when an exception or failure occurs, so problem packages can be redirected away from the automated flow before they can cause a holdup. Workers are still essential to process these tricky exceptions. Peak shopping periods don’t create bottlenecks, they reveal them. In other words, they are increasingly a test of warehouse agility, rather than simple capacity. Autonomous picking robots can give businesses an additional layer of flexibility to meet surging demand, helping them respond to demand spikes while building a more scalable and resilient operation for the future.
Alan Conn, MD, ABB Robotics UK & Ireland
www.abb.com/robotics
automationmagazine.co.uk
Automation | October 2026
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