An adaptive fuzzy internal model control (IMC) scheme is proposed to control nonlinear systems with inherent time delay. A Takagi-Sugeno (TS) fuzzy modeling with adaptive tuner is used to obtain the plant model. TS model is obtained using experimental data of step responses at different input levels and the model accuracy is improved using the normalized least mean squares (nLMS) based online adaptive tuner. Adaptive inverse of the plant is established using adaptive inverse control scheme on TS model with adaptive tuner. The scheme is implemented on a laboratory scale heating process. The experimental results indicate that the heating process output tracks the reference signal.