Anthropic, long known in Silicon Valley for its high-performance A.I. models and API ecosystem used across tech, finance and major consumer brands, is now pushing into the industrial sector. The company this week announced a partnership with IFS Nexus Black—the innovation arm of enterprise software giant IFS, whose customers include Lockheed Martin, Exelon and Quanta Services—and unveiled Resolve, an industrial A.I. platform powered by Claude.
Anthropic already works with household names like BMW, L’Oréal, Sanofi and Panasonic. IFS is Anthropic’s first major customer in heavy industry, where split-second calls can halt production lines or shape how quickly field engineers respond to climate-driven disasters.
“The true test of A.I. is how it performs when the stakes are high,” IFS CEO Kriti Sharma told Observer. “The partnership allows us to bring advanced models into the physical world responsibly and at scale.”
Industrial A.I. bridges digital intelligence and real-world machinery. It predicts equipment failures, optimizes complex processes and reduces dangerous or repetitive work. Unlike consumer A.I. assistants, industrial systems must handle chaotic environments, inconsistent conditions and nonstop operational data.
“It’s about applying A.I. to environments surrounded by sensors and machinery, with people on the ground making high-stakes decisions every minute,” Sharma said. “Industrial A.I. can listen to a turbine and warn of a fault before it happens or ‘see’ subtle changes in a pipeline that would take a human hours to detect. It connects planners, technicians and assets in real time to improve yield, reduce costs and keep frontline operations running safely.”
Garvan Doyle, applied A.I. lead at Anthropic, said the platform also aims to demonstrate responsible A.I. in practice. “It’s about proving that frontier models (advanced, large-scale A.I. systems) can operate effectively where critical infrastructure is on the line,” he told Observer. Claude’s multimodal analysis and ability to synthesize disparate information “is a natural fit for industrial environments and what frontline workers need: an A.I. that can surface insights humans might miss.”
Resolve uses Claude to interpret video feeds, audio from rattling machinery, thermal or pressure readings and even technical diagrams. Workers can speak directly to Resolve, which transcribes notes, connects to documentation and creates an automatic decision trail.
The system’s goal is to reduce busywork, capture institutional knowledge and streamline the exchange between workers and the A.I. tools guiding them.
“Claude is trained to be honest about uncertainty, avoid confabulation and reason carefully through complex problems,” said Doyle. In industrial contexts, that means technicians can see why Claude surfaces a potential fault or recommends a repair and verify it against their own expertise. “Keeping humans in the loop is key, and it’s especially impactful when A.I. works as a force multiplier for skilled workers,” he added.
IFS says its customer, William Grant & Sons, the distiller behind Grant’s whisky and Hendrick’s gin, long struggled with fragmented data that forced 38 percent of repairs to be emergency fixes. With an early deployment of Resolve, IFS estimates the distillery will save roughly $11.05 million annually once the new workflows scale.
Severe weather is also driving demand for industrial A.I. Last year, 27 U.S. natural disasters each caused more than $1 billion in losses. IFS says utilities using Resolve can restore power up to 40 percent faster after storms, floods or wildfires. The system analyzes weather and grid data to predict outages, route crews and coordinate mutual aid.
“We’re solving the hard problems, not retrofitting generic A.I. into critical industries. The context, the data and the risk are completely different and we understand that at a very intimate level,” said Sharma.
Doyle added that Claude’s broad reasoning ability matters in environments where problems “don’t come pre-labeled and edge cases are constant. A narrowly trained system breaks when it encounters something outside its training distribution,” he said. “Claude’s broad intelligence means it can reason through novel situations and synthesize information across domains even when the specific scenario hasn’t been seen before.”
Anthropic is entering an increasingly competitive industrial A.I. race as rivals invest heavily in infrastructure and sector-specific deployments. OpenAI is building its own network of industrial partnerships, including an alliance with Hitachi that embeds OpenAI models in energy, manufacturing and industrial data systems. Deployments like Mattel’s use of Sora 2 for toy design highlight its push into specialized workflows.
The IFS partnership gives Anthropic something its competitors lack: direct access to field operations, maintenance workflows and disaster-response systems where reliability is paramount.
In a sector where scale is often mistaken for capability, Anthropic is betting that trust, precision and resilience will matter most. If early deployments succeed, industrial A.I. could become one of Claude’s most tangible and consequential success stories.
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