CNME Editor Mark Forker secured an exclusive interview with Somya Kapoor, CEO of IFS Loops, during Industrial X Unleashed, hosted by IFS in New York City last month. In a candid exchange, Kapoor highlighted the factors that attracted IFS to acquire her company, how the IFS Loops platform is enabling industrial players to make AI actionable at scale – and what the concept of Industrial AI Applied means to her.
Somya Kapoor is the current CEO of IFS Loops.
Kapoor co-founded TheLoops in 2020, and the company was acquired by Industrial AI software leader IFS in June 2025, for a fee that was undisclosed publicly.
At the time of the acquisition, IFS CEO Mark Moffat, declared that TheLoops would enable them to provide a platform to customers that makes Industrial AI, agentic, actionable, and available at scale.
Kapoor has enjoyed a remarkable career to date, one that began with SAP back in 2005.
She then joined ServiceNow, but her entrepreneurial itch grew stronger as the years elapsed, and in 2017, she became a Founding Team Member and Chief Product Officer of Agentic AI player Aisera.
Then as aforementioned above in July 2020, just a few months into a global pandemic, she co-founded TheLoops.
Many technology companies adopt what can be described as an ‘acquisition strategy’.
However, the challenges and complexities that exist when it comes to absorbing a company have been well-documented.
During Industrial X Unleashed in New York City, CNME sat down with Kapoor to learn more about the acquisition and its role within the overarching IFS business structure.
Kapoor kickstarted the conversation by highlighting how the powers that are be at IFS were giving her the autonomy to protect the culture they had fostered at TheLoops.
“I think that retaining what we do, and not compromising on what made us so unique was hugely important to us from an acquisition standpoint. Mark and Darren gave us huge confidence that they wanted to protect our culture, and they wanted to harness that Silicon Valley energy and edge. They wanted IFS to leverage the speed and agility of what we could deliver,” said Kapoor.
Kapoor believes another key factor that attracted IFS towards acquiring TheLoops was the fact that they truly understood what enterprise grade really meant.
“We’re not just straight out of college and launching a new tech startup. My co-founder and I had worked for major technology companies throughout our respective careers. I had worked for ServiceNow and SAP, whilst my co-founder has been at Splunk, EMC and VMware. We weren’t the cool kids of Silicon Valley, we come from an enterprise grade background, and we have extensive experiences of working with enterprise grade customers like Zscaler, so that gave a lot of assurances to IFS. IFS have sort of kept us functioning as a startup as a business unit under the umbrella of IFS. We bring that agility and speed, and we’ve retained the culture that enabled us to be a success in the first place,” said Kapoor.
When it comes to AI, ultimately, it’s all about outcomes and driving business value for the customers that deploy the technology.
Kapoor revealed that they had an agentic application on TheLoops platform prior to the acquisition by IFS, but that it was more leaning towards the CX side of things.
She stressed the complexities that come with deploying AI and highlighted the need for there to be a total mindset shift.
“Our agentic application was focused on CX, now is that a mission-critical application? Well, it certainly is for several B2B tech companies. When you bring AI into the marketplace, you need to determine how you’re going to deploy it. You can’t just give customers a product and then leave them to it, you need to be hands-on when it comes to helping customers deploy AI into their environment. At the end of the day, it’s not just the technology. Technology is just 40% of what AI delivers, the other 60% is the change management aspect of it. To unleash the potential of AI and get the results you want, there must be a total reset in terms of mindset,” said Kapoor.
Kapoor outlined how they are giving their customers digital workers as templates as a foundation to launch their agentic AI journey.
“Look, there are countless examples of where you see this attitude of my boss has told me to deploy AI, but there are no conversations being had on what projects should be selected, and what to do with the technology. We’re giving customers digital workers as a template. They are out of the box depending on where your data is, these agents might deliver 20% in terms of productivity, but it’s important to be conscious of the fact that these agents are self-learning. They will get to 60%, or 80% in terms of productivity,” said Kapoor.
However, many analysts have expressed concerns over how much access should be given to an agent from a security perspective.
Many organisations have deployed agents in an environment that isn’t controlled, and inevitably there has been an increase in AI-security related incidents.
Kapoor explained that IFS Loops has guardrails in place when it comes to deployment agents across the enterprise.
“Every agent in our IFS Loops platform has a supervisor agent. Essentially, what that means is you have an exact audit trail of what the agent responded to, and where it left. You can implement guardrails on the supervisor agent to circumvent any issues that may arise when an agent doesn’t know how to respond to a certain query or problem. You can tell it to not upload anything and just send you a notification, in which the supervisor can help the agent understand. We’ve put guardrails in place, and we’ll keep adding more. It’s easy to build agents in the environment, but Claude just released a new model, and so did OpenAI and DeepSeek, so it is a battleground, and you’ve got to be adaptive and agile to ensure that you are deploying agents responsibly,” said Kapoor.
As the old adage goes, there is no point adopting technology just for the sake of it.
Kapoor highlighted some of the positive outcomes that IFS Loops has yielded for their customers.
“There are many examples we could provide of where we have driven huge business value for customers. From a supplier order management standpoint, it’s all about how many POs you’re processing per-month, and we are now doing 5,000 per-month. From an inventory replenisher perspective it’s all about how many parts are we able to replenish in real-time? Traditionally, this process consisted of each part being manually uploaded into the IFS Cloud, but that was taking 4-5 days. We looked at it and said we could do this in 1-day. That’s a huge difference and a monumental reduction in cost.
Kapoor then expanded on the mission-critical aspect of what they can deliver through the deployment of digital workers on their platform.
“Traditionally, if a part goes down at 3AM, your field technician is not on site so they can’t call the supply chain manager until 7AM in the morning, so you’re running 4 hours of runtime. That is a huge loss of money. The power of digital workers is that you don’t need to lose 4 hours of runtime, the digital worker can flag the issue and resolve the problem immediately, and all that can be factored into what tasks you want the agent to perform. The availability of these digital workers in mission-critical environments will generate huge savings for businesses,” said Kapoor.
There were several mega-partnerships announced during Industrial X Unleashed, and one of them was with Anthropic.
IFS CEO Mark Moffat described the partnership with Anthropic as a ‘world-first’.
Kapoor echoed the sentiments expressed by Moffat and said in the current climate going it alone was not a practical approach.
“I think this AI world is all about ecosystems of partnerships. We all agree that we can’t build everything in-house. We can’t do it on our own. The other component of the partnership approach that generates huge value is the fact that it opens doors to new use-cases, where traditionally IFS wouldn’t have been in that marketplace. The partnership with Anthropic can help us expand our ecosystem and help our customers get a lot more of these AI capabilities that they’re not traditionally used to,” said Kapoor.
There has been a swathe of major investment in AI that has resulted in stocks skyrocketing on Wall Street.
However, amidst all the AI hype, there are still fears that many of the major tech layoffs we’ve seen over the last few months has been as a direct result of investment in AI.
Kapoor conceded that jobs will undoubtedly be lost because of AI, but she believes that it will be a force for good in the long-term, and that it is designed to empower people to be more efficient and productive.
“I think the fear around AI comes from some of the commentary that has been very one-sided and has insisted that AI is coming for your job. This is an industrial revolution, just like the internet. When the internet emerged, did it take away jobs? It probably took away manual paper-entry jobs, but it has also created thousands of new jobs and changed the way we do business. We’re at the same inflexion point with AI. What I am seeing in Silicon Valley everyday is that the world is changing, and it is real. AI is going to give you a competitive advantage, it’s going to make people more efficient and will increase productivity, there is just no getting away from that. If you want to remain relevant in business, then you can’t resist it. Now, don’t get me wrong, jobs will be lost, but it will create a lot more jobs than the ones it will replace. At the end of the day, when it comes to deploying digital workers, you need to train supervisors to manage those workers, so I certainly don’t subscribe to the negativity and doom and gloom narrative being peddled by some around AI,” said Kapoor.
Kapoor concluded a fascinating interview, by providing me with her definition of what Industrial AI Applied really means.
“Industrial AI Applied is all about intelligent automation. It’s about looking at your business processes and recognising that you’re no longer limited with the boundaries of data being in one system. It’s the data across multiple systems; you’ve got the lens to look across the whole supply chain. How can I make that supply chain more efficient and more productive? How can I drive greater efficiency? It enables you to do more with less, and at the end of the day if you don’t then someone else will, and they will gain that competitive advantage,” said Kapoor.
