IFS reveals that industrial workers spend 41% of their time on manual and repetitive tasks, a situation that is worsening the capacity deficit of organizations. In fact, 77% of decision makers have delayed or avoided a strategic initiative because their teams lacked sufficient capacity to carry it out.
This is reflected in a new study carried out by IFS together with The Futurum Group, based on the responses of 664 managers of industrial companies in North America and Europe, including Spanish managers, which analyzes how organizations are addressing the capacity limitations of their workforces through autonomous digital workers powered by AI.
“The growing gap between the work that industrial organizations need to do and the real capacity of their teams is becoming increasingly costly for companies to ignore,” says Gonzalo Valle, Presales Director at IFS Iberia. Added to this, according to the manager, is “the progressive retirement of experienced engineers and operators in factories, public service companies and supply chains.”
AI models with human intervention
Industrial organizations look to technology for an answer to this lack of capacity. 66% plan to invest in digital workers in the next 12 months and, for every company that does not plan to do so, there are two that will.
However, trust remains a barrier: only 5.7% trust AI to act fully autonomously and just 10% of companies currently use largely autonomous AI. Therefore, the study points towards models with human intervention, in which digital workers take on well-defined and high-volume tasks, while people maintain decisions that require experience and judgment.
Application in industrial environments
This model is already being moved to production environments. IFS Loops Agentic allows 60% of transactions managed by digital workers to be automated from start to finish, while the remaining 40% maintains human review and approval points, in line with the demand for control and transparency identified by the study.
IFS clients such as Kitron Group and KLN Family Brands already use these digital workers in procurement and order-to-pay processes, recovering dozens of hours per week in certain workflows.
In the case of Kitron Group, the company is implementing digital workers in its 13 centers before the end of 2026, integrating them directly into its systems and maintaining existing controls and approval processes. “During the deployment, one of these workers even detected an error in the reference of a part that dated back a decade and that had gone unnoticed in manual processes” they say from IFS.
IFS reveals that industrial workers spend 41% of their time on manual and repetitive tasks, a situation that is worsening the capacity deficit of organizations. In fact, 77% of decision makers have delayed or avoided a strategic initiative because their teams lacked sufficient capacity to carry it out.
This is reflected in a new study carried out by IFS together with The Futurum Group, based on the responses of 664 managers of industrial companies in North America and Europe, including Spanish managers, which analyzes how organizations are addressing the capacity limitations of their workforces through autonomous digital workers powered by AI.
“The growing gap between the work that industrial organizations need to do and the real capacity of their teams is becoming increasingly costly for companies to ignore,” says Gonzalo Valle, Presales Director at IFS Iberia. Added to this, according to the manager, is “the progressive retirement of experienced engineers and operators in factories, public service companies and supply chains.”
AI models with human intervention
Industrial organizations look to technology for an answer to this lack of capacity. 66% plan to invest in digital workers in the next 12 months and, for every company that does not plan to do so, there are two that will.
However, trust remains a barrier: only 5.7% trust AI to act fully autonomously and just 10% of companies currently use largely autonomous AI. Therefore, the study points towards models with human intervention, in which digital workers take on well-defined and high-volume tasks, while people maintain decisions that require experience and judgment.
Application in industrial environments
This model is already being moved to production environments. IFS Loops Agentic allows 60% of transactions managed by digital workers to be automated from start to finish, while the remaining 40% maintains human review and approval points, in line with the demand for control and transparency identified by the study.
IFS clients such as Kitron Group and KLN Family Brands already use these digital workers in procurement and order-to-pay processes, recovering dozens of hours per week in certain workflows.
In the case of Kitron Group, the company is implementing digital workers in its 13 centers before the end of 2026, integrating them directly into its systems and maintaining existing controls and approval processes. “During the deployment, one of these workers even detected an error in the reference of a part that dated back a decade and that had gone unnoticed in manual processes” they say from IFS.
“The capacity gap has a direct impact on industrial operations. A delayed order, maintenance schedule or delivery can result in downtime, non-compliance or stopped equipment. Our customers are demonstrating that digital workers, designed for specific tasks and integrated into existing systems, can help recover that capacity in real production environments,” says Somya Kapoor, CEO of IFS Loops.
The speed of implementation is another relevant factor. Ependion deployed its Supply Order Manager digital worker in ten weeks, while Kitron Group plans to have its 13 plants operational in less than seven months.
Two out of three companies of the industrial sector will invest in digital workers in the next 12 months
“The capacity gap has a direct impact on industrial operations. A delayed order, maintenance schedule or delivery can result in downtime, non-compliance or stopped equipment. Our customers are demonstrating that digital workers, designed for specific tasks and integrated into existing systems, can help recover that capacity in real production environments,” says Somya Kapoor, CEO of IFS Loops.
The speed of implementation is another relevant factor. Ependion deployed its Supply Order Manager digital worker in ten weeks, while Kitron Group plans to have its 13 plants operational in less than seven months.
With all this, the capacity gap affects all sectors in which IFS operates, although the adoption of digital workers advances at different rates in each industry.
