Industrial workers in factories, utilities and supply chains spend 41% of their working hours on manual, repetitive tasks, creating a capacity gap that is delaying strategic initiatives as experienced engineers and operators retire. Research by The Futurum Group on behalf of IFS found that 77% of decision-makers have delayed or abandoned initiatives because their teams lack capacity. At the same time, 66% of enterprises may invest in digital workers within the next year, although only 5.7% trust AI to operate fully autonomously and just 10% currently run highly autonomous AI systems. The findings support a human-machine collaborative model in which purpose-built digital workers monitor, decide and execute clearly defined, high-volume tasks, while people retain responsibility for judgment, review and approval. IFS says its IFS Loops agentic platform can automate 60% of agentic business processes end to end, with the remaining 40% reserved for human involvement. Customers including Kitron Group, KLN Family Brands and Ependion are using digital workers in production procurement, order-to-pay and supply-order workflows. Kitron plans to deploy purchase-to-order digital workers across all 13 sites by the end of 2026, while Ependion brought its Supply Order Manager online through a phased 10-week rollout. IFS will showcase the technology at its Unleashed 2026 conference in Orlando, Florida, from October 12–16.