Manufacturing organisations are increasingly looking to agentic AI and digital workers to address workforce capacity pressures, as skilled workers remain stretched by persistent skills shortages and increasingly complex operations, according to new research commissioned by IFS.
IFS said new research from The Futurum Group found industrial workers lose 41% of their time to manual, repetitive tasks, contributing to a capacity gap between the work organisations need to complete and the available workforce.
Paul Butterworth, Managing Director ANZ at IFS, said Australia had spent decades responding to an ageing workforce and skills shortages across heavy industries.
“Engineers, technicians and trades remain stretched across major infrastructure, energy, defence and industrial projects,” Butterworth said.
He said while investment in attracting, training and retaining workers remained important, AI could help organisations address capacity constraints alongside workforce investment.
“AI allows us to tackle the problem on all sides,” Butterworth said.
The research found 77% of decision-makers had delayed or avoided a strategic initiative because their teams lacked the capacity to pursue it. At the same time, interest in digital workers is growing, with 66% of decision-makers saying they were likely to invest in the technology within the next 12 months.
However, adoption remains at an early stage. Only 10% of enterprises surveyed were running mostly autonomous AI, while just 5.7% of decision-makers said they trusted AI to act fully autonomously.
IFS said the findings point to a human-in-the-loop approach, where digital workers undertake routine, high-volume tasks while employees remain involved in decisions requiring judgement or intervention.
“We’re already working with industrial organisations to use digital workers for routine operational processes such as supplier orders, inventory management, and field service, while keeping people involved where judgement or intervention is required,” Butterworth said.
IFS said its IFS Loops Agentic Platform enables enterprises to deploy digital workers that automate 60% of agentic transactions end-to-end, with the remaining 40% incorporating human review and approval checkpoints.
The company said manufacturing customer Kitron Group is rolling out purchase-to-order digital workers across all 13 of its sites by the end of 2026, while maintaining existing business rules and approval processes. IFS said a digital worker also identified a decade-old part-number error during the rollout that had previously gone undetected.
Somya Kapoor, CEO of IFS Loops, said digital workers could help industrial organisations create additional capacity without removing human oversight.
“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,” Kapoor said.
Butterworth said shifting repetitive work away from skilled employees could allow them to focus on more complex operational tasks.
“By shifting repetitive work away from skilled teams, organisations can create more capacity for the complex operational work where experience really matters,” he said.
IFS said the pace of digital worker deployment varies across industries, with trust, human oversight and the nature of individual operational processes influencing adoption.
