Kodiak Gas Services needs to scale, humans and digital workers are the answer

Kodiak Gas Services has a booming business due to the AI data center buildout; it needs to hire more people and retain the experienced employees it has. The bit: AI-powered digital workers can complement humans in the field and staff up to meet demand.

AT IFS Unleashed 2026, Kodiak executives were in multiple sessions and the primary keynote talking about the returns on its IFS Loops digital worker, known as Material Replenisher, and future plans. IFS Loops Digital Workers are a set of AI agents that work toward an outcome.

For Kodiak, Material Replenisher has already generated returns after going live in June. Here's how it works: A technician requests a part in Microsoft Teams; the digital worker validates it against live inventory and supplier data and creates a requisition in IFS and routes it for approval.

Material Replenisher runs inside of Kodi, Kodiak's own AI orchestrator built on Microsoft Foundry on Azure. Kodi is set up to abstract multiple agents and models and serve as one interface to agentic AI processes and workflows.

The IFS Loops digital work runs across 18 sites and 48 planners and handles more than 150 part requests a day. IFS Loops digital workers are being used for processes within the IFS ERP system across finance, supply chain, operations and sales, said Pedro Buhigas, Kodiak Gas' chief information officer.

Kodiak launched IFS as its core ERP system in August 2025.

"Material Replenisher reduced transaction time from 15 minutes to 20 minutes down to two to three minutes," explained Buhigas. "More importantly, those interactions that happen at 2 am or 3 am don't require someone to get out of bed to answer the phone."

Other benefits from Material Replenisher include:

• An 87% efficiency gain.
• 57% faster part search from 34.1 seconds to 14.8 seconds.
• Capacity of 43 full time employees returned to the field.

According to Claudia Malibran, VP of IT at Kodiak, the company took an approach that created pilots and scaled from there. "A lot of our warehouses are unmanned and in the middle of nowhere," said Malibran. The Material Replenisher could pinpoint the right part and point the technician to the closest warehouse.

"Part of the challenge was not just to find the location for that part, but it's to find the right part for that piece of equipment," she said. "We had to have a supply chain specialist available especially at night and over the weekend."

Kodiak has about 1,400 IFS Cloud users including 900 field technicians.

More from IFS Unleashed 2026:

• Palihapitiya on AI valuations, energy, auditors
• How IFS’ industrial customers are approaching AI use cases
• IFS launches IFS Intelligence, Industrial AI Harness, eyes industrial productivity
• How aviation maintenance looks at AI systems

The big picture

Kodiak is leveraging AI agents and digital workers because demand is booming due to the AI infrastructure buildout. Kodiak is a natural gas compression services company that operates in the energy and utilities markets.

Simply put, Kodiak needs to scale in the next two years. Speaking on Kodiak's second quarter earnings, CEO Robert McKee said, "our existing power assets remain in high demand with our current fleet about 90% utilized as we make ready much of our idle fleet."

He said customers are extending equipment contracts and Kodiak has been able to raise prices. "As we look forward to the second half of 2026, we expect to receive approximately 50 megawatts of new gen sets before deliveries ramp up in 2027," said McKee.

The company's natural gas compression fleet is expected to expand to about 1.8 GW of power by 2030.

Ramping equipment and deliveries also means more hiring and training. Kodiak is complementing humans with digital workers and not looking to replace them. Kodiak will continue to hire technicians in the months and years ahead.

McKee said the company has been investing in its technician training program and adding a new power curriculum. The Kodiak CEO added that its certification program for technicians is a competitive edge.

"The skilled workforce will be helpful as we start undertaking on-site engine overhauls of power assets and other field-level operations in the second half of the year," said McKee.

In addition, Kodiak said it is also creating new workforce roles as it rolls out AI tools. A new AI-enabled technical monitoring system will require more software engineers as well as field technicians who can monitor and assess information.

"As we've rolled out new technology, we have reallocated experienced technicians into positions in our industry-leading fleet reliability center and our fleet telemetry group. Kodiak's investment in artificial intelligence and machine learning is creating new roles and opportunities, allowing our workforce to grow and develop," said McKee, who said the technology roadmap includes wearable devices, autonomous AI tools and more data from its fleet.

Humans and AI

Buhigas said Kodiak is likely to build a set of digital workers that become crews with managers and orchestrators. AI already sends crews out to do physical work because machine learning models predict asset failures and open work orders in IFS.

What's in it for the humans? "They're getting dispatched to a known problem versus having to do a round trip on an asset just to make sure it's healthy," said Buhigas.

Buhigas indicated that the Kodiak strategy is human and AI working together. There's a shortage of workers and "our governor of growth is our ability to hire people and any time we can inject a digital worker to act as a force multiplier it's a huge win for the organization," said Buhigas.

MD Akil, director of project management at Kodiak, said the company can lose workers for only a few extra dollars an hour and user experience matters. "AI can improve the user experience and improve employee satisfaction scores. One of the biggest problems that we have in our industry is retention," said Akil. "Having ease of usability at hand in house is a huge retention factor."

Buhigas added that Kodiak is looking to build digital workers for invoice processing in accounts payable and other ERP-centric processes. Kodiak said IFS Loops was chosen for its digital workers because it is integrated with IFS' ERP platform and work is auditable and traceable.

In the end, the goal is to put humans on higher value tasks. "Whether you're somebody in supply chain or accounting, or if you're a mechanic in the field, you're always interacting with Kodi, and based on the context of the question, it's being redirected to the right digital worker," said Malibran.