As artificial intelligence reshapes workplaces globally, one of the less glamorous – but highly critical – areas seeing disruption is employee scheduling. Experts noted that from restaurants and retail chains to healthcare and logistics firms, managers still spend hours every week manually building staff schedules, handling call-outs and balancing labour costs.

According to Gartner, AI-driven automation is expected to become deeply embedded in workforce management systems over the next few years as companies look to reduce operational inefficiencies and manager burnout. Industry reports also show that labour shortages and rising wage pressures are pushing businesses to adopt smarter workforce tools that can optimise staffing in real time.

Against this backdrop, teenage entrepreneur Noah Marbach believes the workforce scheduling industry does not need incremental upgrades – it needs a complete rebuild.

Marbach, founder and CEO of XShift AI, says traditional workforce software companies are still focused on helping managers “build schedules faster,” while his company is attempting to eliminate manual scheduling altogether.

“The industry has spent years helping managers click faster,” Marbach said. “But I kept asking a different question: Why should managers be building schedules manually at all?”

Workforce scheduling has traditionally remained a heavily manual process despite years of software development. Managers often need to juggle employee availability, overtime exposure, labour costs, PTO requests, skill requirements, rest periods and staffing demands simultaneously.

Marbach argues that this creates a massive operational burden.

“When you multiply 10-plus constraints across 100 employees, managers can end up spending more than 10 hours a week just creating and adjusting schedules,” he said.

According to him, the cost extends beyond wasted time. Manual scheduling often contributes to burnout, inconsistent employee experiences, overstaffing, understaffing and higher turnover rates.

XShift AI attempts to solve this using conversational AI. Instead of manually dragging shifts across calendars, managers can simply instruct the platform through prompts such as: “Generate next week’s schedule and avoid overtime.”

The system then automatically validates operational constraints including availability, employee preferences, overtime limits, labour budgets and role eligibility before generating schedules within seconds.

Marbach says one of the biggest operational pain points companies face is handling last-minute call-outs.

Traditional systems still require managers to manually search for replacements, verify qualifications, check overtime exposure and contact available workers individually.

To address this, XShift AI introduced an “Autopilot” system designed to automate replacement workflows.

“If a call-out happens early enough, Autopilot can automatically identify and assign a qualified replacement while validating availability, overtime, employee preferences, labour budgets and company rules,” Marbach explained.

If shifts are too close to start times, the platform can notify qualified employees through in-app alerts where workers can accept shifts with a single tap.

The company positions this approach as a shift from managers “building schedules” to managers simply defining operational outcomes.

Marbach believes workforce management is one of the clearest examples of this transformation.

“For years, software has been built around the idea that humans operate software,” he said. “Over the next five years, that equation flips. Humans will define outcomes. AI will execute.”

He believes managers will increasingly spend less time clicking through dashboards and handling administrative work, and more time leading teams and growing businesses.

“The companies that win over the next decade will not be the companies that help managers build schedules faster,” Marbach said. “They will be the companies that remove the need for managers to build schedules in the first place.”