IFS finds that industrial workers lose 41% of their time to manual, repetitive tasks creating a capacity gap across organisations. New research from The Futurum Group shows companies are closing that gap with a sharp shift toward agentic, AI-powered digital workers – AI agents that autonomously monitor, decide, and execute operational tasks, escalating to humans only when judgment is required. The capacity gap – the widening distance between the work industrial organisations need to do and the actual capacity of their teams – is becoming increasingly costly for businesses to ignore. A workforce change is also already underway, and hitting industrial organisations hardest: across factories, utilities, and supply chains, experienced engineers and operators are retiring.
Key findings:
- 77% of decision-makers have delayed or avoided a strategic initiative because their team lacked the capacity to pursue it
- Digital workers adoption is accelerating: two businesses are investing in digital workers over the next 12 months for every one that isn’t. Trust, not technology, is the holdup. Just 5.7% of decision-makers trust AI to act fully autonomously, even though 66% say they’re likely to invest in digital workers within the year
- Only 10% of enterprises run mostly autonomous AI. Adoption is still early, but the intent-to-invest numbers show it won’t stay that way.
Industrial companies want to address the capacity gap with new technologies but hesitate to put their full trust in automation. The research underscores the need for human-in-the-loop models of AI deployment, where digital workers handle high-volume, well-defined tasks while people make judgement calls.
The IFS Loops Agentic Platform delivers digital workers precisely when industries need them. The platform enables enterprises to create and deploy digital workers that automate 60% of agentic transactions end to end. The remaining 40% include human review and approval checkpoints, reflecting industrial customers’ desire for transparency and validation.
IFS customers across sectors are already running purpose-built digital workers in production. Several customers, including Kitron Group and KLN Family Brands, are using digital workers to reclaim dozens of hours a week on core procurement and order-to-pay workflows, with several pushing toward a fully automated processing, with no manual interception.
Manufacturer Kitron Group is rolling out purchase-to-order digital workers across all 13 of its sites by the end of 2026, built directly into the software the business already uses. This meant that the guardrails and rules the business had already set up were followed, and the exisiting approvals process stayed intact. During this rollout, a digital worker surfaced a decade-old part-number error that a manual process had missed for years, showing that digital workers can find and fix data problems as they run, instead of requiring a data cleanup project before deployment.
Somya Kapoor, CEO IFS Loops, said: “The capacity gap is a high-stakes problem in industrial operations. When a purchase order, a maintenance schedule, or a supplier delivery falls behind because there aren’t enough hours in the day for the worker, the cost shows up as downtime, missed deliveries, or idle equipment. Closing it takes more than general-purpose AI. Digital workers built for the job, integrated into the systems already running the business, are what let teams reclaim capacity instead of just working around the shortfall. Our customers prove that model in production, not pilots.”
The capacity gap shows up across every industry IFS serves, but the pace and shape of digital worker deployment varies from sector to sector, reflecting the need for digital workers built for industrial operations.
Speed matters when putting digital workers to work. Ependion brought its Supply Order Manager digital worker live company-wide in a 10-week progressive rollout, while Kitron Group is on track to have all 13 of its sites live in under seven months.
*Read the full Futurum Research report Bridging the Capacity Gap: Why 66% of Enterprises Are Investing in Agentic Digital Workers , commissioned by IFS: https://go.ifs.com/bridging-the-capacity-gap Join IFS at Unleashed 2026, October 12–16 in Orlando, Florida, to see how digital workers and Industrial AI are closing the capacity gap in practice. Register at unleashed.ifs.com.
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