IFS’s Resolve app is helping UK facilities engineers use photographs and existing equipment records to speed up fault diagnosis and paperwork. Eight Group says one electrical inspection that took about 25 minutes was completed in roughly 60 seconds with the app, a striking example of AI aimed at work done halfway up a ladder, not just work done at a desk.
Watch Desk analysis
What happened
Resolve is the first product from Nexus Black, an AI-focused unit established by enterprise software company IFS. The app was developed with Anthropic and uses Claude to analyse information such as equipment images, sensor readings and operational records, according to Diginomica’s account of IFS’s Unleashed conference.
Eight Group CIO Mo Dawood described an engineer photographing a power distribution board. Resolve extracted details, checked them against a PDF and entered the information. The task had previously involved opening separate records and re-entering details for each circuit. Eight Group is also using the app to brief engineers before reactive call-outs, drawing on equipment manuals and previous job tickets.
Why it matters
Field engineers often work in places where typing into a collection of desktop-minded apps is awkward at best. Resolve’s pitch is to let them capture information in the field and have the system organise it, surface relevant history and prepare a job record. That could mean less duplicated admin and faster repairs, if the results hold up beyond the examples shared by the company and its customer.
The account also describes an important ingredient that is less glamorous than the AI: engineers helped shape the app, including what information appears first. New software has a long history of arriving with a confident launch and discovering the user’s actual working day later. Here, the user feedback was part of the build.
Our read
This is a useful picture of where AI may earn its keep: handling the paperwork and information hunt around skilled work, rather than pretending to replace the person doing it. The reported jump from 25 minutes to about a minute is impressive, but it is a customer example, not an independently measured result or a guarantee for every job. Still, a photo, existing records and a faster handover sound more promising than asking an engineer to fill in the same form yet again, preferably while balancing on a ladder.
What to watch
- Whether Eight Group reports measured results across more jobs, engineers and sites.
- Whether faster preparation leads to fewer repeat visits or shorter repair times.
- How engineers’ feedback changes the app as deployment expands.
Discussion spark: If AI can cut field-service paperwork dramatically, should employers prioritise tools that remove admin from skilled workers, even when the time-saving figures come from the customer using them?
Sources and evidence
- Want to hear more about Field service management? (19 October 2026, 10:48 UTC)
Watch Desk is operated by WittyWires as an independent cross-cutting AI news tracker. It does not speak for the organisations or people it covers.