Industrial Workers Lose 41% of Time to Manual Tasks

Industrial organizations are facing a growing capacity gap as workers lose 41% of their time to manual, repetitive tasks, according to new research from The Futurum Group commissioned by IFS, a leading provider of Industrial AI software.

The capacity gap—the widening distance between the work industrial organizations need to do and the actual capacity of their teams—is becoming increasingly costly to ignore. A workforce transition is already underway, with experienced engineers and operators across factories, utilities, and supply chains retiring at accelerating rates.

Strategic Initiatives Delayed Due to Capacity Constraints

The research reveals that 77% of decision-makers have delayed or avoided a strategic initiative because their team lacked the capacity to pursue it. At the same time, digital worker adoption is accelerating: two businesses are investing in digital workers over the next 12 months for every one that isn’t.

However, trust remains a significant barrier. Just 5.7% of decision-makers trust AI to act fully autonomously, even though 66% say they are likely to invest in digital workers within the year. Only 10% of enterprises currently run mostly autonomous AI, indicating that adoption is still early but intent-to-invest numbers suggest rapid change ahead.

Human-in-the-Loop Model Prevails

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 judgment calls. Industrial companies want to address the capacity gap with new technologies but hesitate to put their full trust in automation.

The IFS Loops Agentic Platform addresses this need by enabling 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.

Real-World Results Across Industries

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 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 approach ensured that existing guardrails, rules, and approvals processes remained intact.

During the rollout, a digital worker surfaced a decade-old part-number error that a manual process had missed for years, demonstrating that digital workers can find and fix data problems as they operate, rather than requiring a data cleanup project before deployment.

Speed of Deployment Matters

Speed is proving critical 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.

“The capacity gap is a high-stakes problem in industrial operations,” said Somya Kapoor, CEO of IFS Loops. “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.”