IFS Reports Accelerating Adoption of Agentic AI Digital Workers in Aerospace
Why It MattersAerospace maintenance and supply-chain software is shifting toward human-in-the-loop AI automation as manufacturers and airlines seek to offset engineering labour shortages and capacity gaps.
IFS has published new research conducted by The Futurum Group indicating that aerospace companies are accelerating adoption of agentic, AI-powered digital workers — autonomous agents that monitor, decide and execute operational tasks, escalating to human operators only when judgment is required. IFS says the research points to a widening gap between the volume of work industrial organisations must perform and their teams' actual capacity, a shortfall worsened by the retirement of experienced engineers and operators across factories, utilities and supply chains, and it advocates human-in-the-loop models where digital workers handle high-volume, well-defined tasks while people retain judgment calls.
IFS's Loops Agentic Platform is designed to let enterprises deploy digital workers that automate 60% of agentic transactions end to end, with the remaining 40% incorporating human review and approval checkpoints. Somya Kapoor, CEO of IFS Loops, said the capacity gap is a high-stakes problem in industrial operations, since delays to purchase orders, maintenance schedules or supplier deliveries translate directly into downtime, missed deliveries or idle equipment.
Kitron Group, an electronics manufacturing services provider serving the aerospace sector, is rolling out purchase-to-order digital workers across all 13 of its sites by the end of 2026, during which a digital worker surfaced a decade-old part-number error that manual processes had missed for years. IFS also serves airlines and aviation operators: China Airlines selected IFS in the first half of 2026, Air France Industries and KLM Engineering & Maintenance selected IFS's Maintenix solution in 2004, Ethiopian Airlines uses IFS Maintenix for its 777-200LR and Q400 fleets, and Copa Airlines deployed IFS Maintenix in October 2017, since expanding the system to 100 aircraft.
