IFS study finds industrial firms turning to AI workers

IFS has published research on a workforce capacity gap in industrial organisations. The study found that many businesses are turning to AI-based digital workers to handle repetitive operational tasks.

The findings point to a broad problem in industrial operations. The research found that 71.8% of organisations said around half, most, or nearly all of their operational knowledge is undocumented, while 74.9% said it takes four months or longer for new operational employees to reach full productivity.

That shortfall is affecting growth plans. The survey found that 77% of decision-makers had delayed or cancelled a strategic initiative because their teams lacked the capacity to deliver it.

Industrial workers lose 41% of their time to manual and repetitive work, according to IFS. The company argues that the gap is widening as experienced engineers and operators retire across factories, utilities, and supply chains.

Investment plans

The research, conducted by The Futurum Group, suggests spending on digital workers is rising despite caution over full automation. For every business not planning to invest in digital workers over the next year, two said they were preparing to do so.

Trust remains a constraint. Just 5.7% of decision-makers said they trust AI to act fully autonomously, and only 10% of enterprises currently run mostly autonomous AI, the study found.

That has pushed companies towards systems that keep people involved in decisions. In this model, software handles defined, repetitive tasks, while employees review exceptions or steps that require judgement.

IFS said its Loops Agentic Platform is designed around that structure. It said the system automates 60% of agentic transactions from start to finish, while the remaining 40% include human review and approval checkpoints.

Industrial use

IFS pointed to existing customer deployments in procurement and order-to-pay work. Those users are applying digital workers to recover staff time from routine processes rather than handing over whole operations to autonomous systems.

Kitron Group and KLN Family Brands were cited as examples of businesses using digital workers in production. According to IFS, those deployments have reduced the hours spent each week on core procurement and order-to-pay workflows.

Kitron Group is rolling out purchase-to-order digital workers across all 13 of its sites. IFS said the rollout was built into software the manufacturer already uses, so existing rules and approvals remained in place.

During that process, a digital worker identified a part-number error that had gone unnoticed for years in a manual workflow, according to IFS. The company said the example showed how software can detect and correct some data issues while transactions are being processed.

Another customer, Ependion, brought its Supply Order Manager digital worker live across the company in a 10-week progressive rollout. IFS said Kitron is on course to have all 13 sites live in under seven months.

Sector patterns

The study found the capacity gap across the sectors IFS serves, though deployment differs by industry. The research included sector-specific use cases across manufacturing, energy and utilities, transportation and logistics, construction and engineering, aerospace and defence, and telecommunications.

Those differences suggest companies are looking for narrower applications tied to existing operational software and processes. The pattern also indicates that many industrial groups still favour targeted automation over broader autonomous decision-making.

Somya Kapoor, Chief Executive Officer, 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."