IFS partners with Ishilon to localise industrial artificial intelligence in Saudi Arabia

Global software firm IFS announced a strategic partnership in Riyadh with Saudi company Ishilon, aiming to deploy its specialized platform IFS.ai in heavy-industry sectors across the Kingdom. The move targets a market in which industrial activities account for 45 percent of Saudi Arabia’s $1.1 trillion GDP, as digital-transformation investments accelerate under Vision 2030 programs to modernize complex operating processes in energy, manufacturing, oil and gas, mining, construction, utilities, supply chains, defense and telecommunications.

Ishilon, based in Riyadh and founded by Prince Khalid bin Badr Al Saud, is responsible for publishing and localising the AI system of the original Swedish company founded in 1983, which operates in more than 80 countries with a workforce exceeding 7,000 employees. The platform provides an enterprise software layer covering operational asset management, field service, maintenance planning, and capital-asset investment decisions.The alliance represents a direct effort to turn massive industrial spending into enterprise software revenue, leveraging a local access network that cuts years of self-building.

The move comes amid a sharp shift in technology-spending priorities among decision-makers in the enterprise-software sector; a research survey conducted by Futurcom for the first half of 2026, covering 806 technology leaders, showed that generative AI topped technical priorities, with 32.8 percent of respondents ranking it first and 76.6 percent placing it among their top three choices, followed by analytical and predictive AI at 75.8 percent and autonomous agents at 62.4 percent. Earlier data also indicated that 59.7 percent of enterprise executives see supply-chain management and disruption forecasting as the primary area for deploying intelligent software agents.

Market estimates indicate that the enterprise-software market is set to expand from $592.4 billion in 2025 to about $1.103 trillion by 2031, at a compound annual growth rate of 10.9 percent, while the enterprise resource-planning (ERP) segment is expected to grow at 12 percent per year. With IFS reporting $0.61 billion in ERP revenue for 2025 and a market share of roughly 1.01 percent, capturing additional share in a core market such as Saudi Arabia represents a critical commercial opportunity to boost its revenues against major global vendors like SAP and Oracle.

The real success factor for this system will not rest on contract signing alone, but will depend entirely on deep implementation, technical localisation and strict regulatory compliance.Expanding in the Saudi industrial environment requires a continual commitment to supporting Arabic, aligning data-security standards with regulators and public-sector companies, and building field personnel to serve customers. If the operating model succeeds between the two firms, it could chart a repeatable path in the rest of the Gulf Cooperation Council markets through 2027.

What practically changes for engineering leaders and supply-chain and operations managers in the Gulf is the introduction of a new software option that focuses exclusively on high-utilisation assets, prompting a reassessment of predictive-maintenance costs and field efficiency rather than relying on traditional administrative ERP systems. This shift also raises demand for engineering skills that integrate maintenance computing and operational data in factories and energy sites with advanced analytical models, and forces regional and global providers to accelerate the localisation of their software solutions within critical facilities.