Industrial firms are increasingly turning to agentic AI as they struggle with a widening capacity gap in supply chains, according to research from IFS. The software company said industrial workers lose an average of 41 per cent of their time to manual, repetitive tasks, while shortages of skilled staff and the retirement of experienced engineers are making it harder to keep operations moving.
The scale of the pressure is already forcing strategic compromises. IFS said 77 per ce...
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nt of the decision-makers it surveyed had postponed or abandoned at least one initiative because their teams lacked the capacity to deliver it. The strain is especially visible in production, maintenance and supply functions, where organisations are losing institutional knowledge as veteran employees leave and younger recruits are not yet able to fill the gap.
That is helping to drive interest in so-called digital workers, AI systems designed to carry out standard operational tasks with limited human intervention. IFS said two-thirds of respondents expect to invest in this technology within the next year, suggesting that adoption is moving quickly even if trust in the technology remains limited. Only 10 per cent of companies currently use largely autonomous AI, while just 5.7 per cent of decision-makers said they trust AI to operate completely independently.
The caution is reflected in the way many companies are approaching deployment. Rather than handing over entire processes to machines, firms are favouring a human-in-the-loop model in which AI agents handle routine work but escalate important decisions to staff members. That structure is designed to preserve control while still easing pressure on overstretched teams.
Procurement and order management are emerging as early use cases. IFS said electronics manufacturer Kitron Group is introducing digital workers into its purchase-to-order process, embedding them in existing business software and keeping them within established security and approval rules. The system is expected to be rolled out across all 13 of Kitron’s sites by the end of 2026.
The company said the implementation has already exposed a part-number error that had remained in its system for a decade, a finding IFS points to as evidence that digital workers can do more than simply automate repetitive activity. They can also surface long-standing data problems that human teams may overlook.
Other customers are applying the same approach to procurement and order-to-pay workflows, with IFS describing the aim as progressively higher levels of automation without removing human oversight entirely. The company said Ependion installed a digital employee for supply-order management across the business in ten weeks, underlining how quickly some firms are moving once the decision to adopt has been made.
IFS argues that the wider significance lies in the shift from asking whether AI should be used at all to deciding where it can operate independently and where people must remain in control. In industrial supply chains, where delays, errors and labour shortages can quickly cascade through the system, that balance is becoming one of the defining operational questions.
Source: Noah Wire Services
