What Industrial AI Actually Looks Like | Kriti Sharma, Nexus Black
Episode
23 min
Read time
2 min
Topics
Relationships, Leadership, Design & UX
AI-Generated Summary
Key Takeaways
- ✓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.
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.
Notable Moment
A utility worker who led disaster response during the early 2025 California wildfires contacted Nexus Black after seeing their utilities product, stating it would accelerate getting hospitals powered and communities restored. Sharma described this unsolicited message as the clearest validation of why the technology matters.
Episode Transcript
I'm Craig Smith with IONAI on the sidelines of IFS's IndustrialX conference in New York City. IFS is the leading provider of industrial AI software. It provides AI solutions for asset centric industries, think energy, utilities, manufacturing, and aerospace. I'm interviewing Kriti Sharma, CEO of IFS's new unit, Nexus Black, which builds solutions for hard problems. Okay. Kriti, great to meet you. Lovely to see you in in New York. Yeah. Can you introduce yourself to listeners? To begin, tell us your background, how you got to IFS, and how you got to Nexus Black. Yeah. Sure. I'm Priti. I grew up in India. As a kid, I used to build robots. They didn't solve very important things. The first robot I built as a kid, it helped, fetch Snickers to candy from the snack bar at 3PM every day. Wow. Much to my parents delight. I do better things with my life now. I'm a computer scientist by background. And then started building AI businesses and products in the last ten to fifteen years. Yeah. And for the most part in my career, I've built AI businesses and products for people who work at their desks. Accountants and lawyers and and so on. But, I was fascinated by building businesses, products, experiences for people who are not at their desk. Yeah. And that's what brought me to IFS. We started Nexus Black earlier this year. It is a business inside of IFS that works with the most strategic clients boots on ground. If you think about AI with a hard hat on, hard hat on, that's us. We go on the ground. We spend weekends in hangars. We spend our days in refineries and factories, and we travel along with the field technicians so that we build things where failure is not an option. Yeah. And given your your background in in robotics, I'm just curious. Where where did you study? Where did you, study computer science? At Saint Andrews in The UK, on the East Coast Of Scotland. Lovely tiny small town. That's a wonderful school. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. I I've always loved building things, and I'm so glad I get to do that now in the physical world. Every day is a joy. And and, yeah, you start to learn how different it is to build things for people at their desks versus in factories and hangars and plants and sykes and in the field. It's, it's much more challenging and more fun. Yeah. And and I was talking to Mark Moffat earlier about, some of the the, work that you guys are doing with, Boston Dynamics and one x, on, I guess it's still called Spot on the robot dog and with Neo, the humanoid robot. How and is that your focus at Nexus Black? Or I know you're also working with Resolve. Was that a Nexus Black product? Yeah. So Nexus Black products are, regardless of the form factor. Yeah. We're very focused on …
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by Anthropic
“Nexus Black domain-trains Claude from Anthropic to interpret these diagrams, enabling upstream and downstream fault tracing.”
company
“Kriti Sharma, CEO of IFS's Nexus Black unit, explains how her team deploys production-grade industrial AI across manufacturing, utilities, and aerospace”
by IFS
“Kriti Sharma, CEO of IFS's Nexus Black unit, explains how her team deploys production-grade industrial AI across manufacturing, utilities, and aerospace”
“Nexus Black domain-trains Claude from Anthropic to interpret these diagrams, enabling upstream and downstream fault tracing.”
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