Industrial workforce capacity gap being filled by agentic digital workers

LONDON, August 26, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- IFS, the leading provider of Industrial AI software, finds that industrial workers lose 41% of their time to manual, repetitive tasks creating a capacity gap across organizations. 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 organizations 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 organizations 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.

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