What Industrial AI Actually Looks Like | Kriti Sharma, Nexus Black

What It Covers

Kriti Sharma, CEO of IFS's Nexus Black unit, explains how her team deploys production-grade industrial AI across manufacturing, utilities, and aerospace by embedding engineers on-site at refineries, hangars, and factories to solve high-stakes operational problems within three weeks of engagement.

Key Questions Answered

• •On-site deployment model: Nexus Black achieves measurable client value within three weeks by physically embedding engineers at industrial sites — refineries, distilleries, aircraft hangars — rather than building remotely. This ground-level presence reveals constraints invisible from an office, such as workers refusing to remove safety gloves to type, which redirects the entire interface design toward voice-based interaction.
• •Domain-specific AI training: Generic AI models fail in industrial settings because critical data exists in formats like piping and instrumentation diagrams — complex engineering schematics unreadable without decades of expertise. Nexus Black domain-trains Claude from Anthropic to interpret these diagrams, enabling upstream and downstream fault tracing. William Grant distillery projects £8.4 million in annual savings at a single factory using this approach.
• •Edge deployment for connectivity-free environments: Industrial sites including offshore platforms have no reliable Wi-Fi, making cloud-dependent AI unworkable. Nexus Black compresses trained models and deploys them directly onto certified on-site devices, enabling full AI functionality in zero-connectivity environments. Identifying these infrastructure constraints before building is treated as a prerequisite, not an afterthought, to avoid production failure.
• •Aviation compliance automation: Airlines and operators face regulatory fines of $1–20 million per compliance error and $140 million per day in revenue loss from grounded fleets. Nexus Black's airworthiness solution reads hundreds of pages of FAA service bulletins and airworthiness directives, cross-references fleet tail numbers and parts inventories, and generates specific maintenance action plans — replacing weeks of manual engineer review.
• •Disaster response coordination for utilities: Nexus Black is building a utilities disaster-response product in partnership with Anthropic's extended agentic model capabilities. When storms, wildfires, or grid failures occur, the system coordinates complex multi-crew field actions and long-range planning in real time, replacing ad-hoc coordination methods like crews assembling in parking lots to receive paper instructions before deploying to restore power.