The Role of AI in Transforming Scheduling in Workforce Management

How intelligently automated scheduling is redefining labor efficiency and employee experience

Scheduling is one of the most complex and time-consuming challenges in frontline operations, yet it’s also essential to get right. Managers must navigate ever-changing demand, employee preferences, compliance constraints, and operational goals, often using outdated tools and manual processes.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the workforce management (WFM) landscape, and scheduling is one of the most impacted areas. Businesses that leverage AI are unlocking new levels of labor efficiency, employee engagement, and operational agility.

According to the 2025 Legion State of the North American Hourly Workforce Report, more than 55% of managers believe AI could make scheduling easier. Yet, fewer than 11% currently use a solution that automatically generates schedules, and 40% still rely on manual processes like texting or calling employees to fill shifts, adding to administrative burden, labor costs, and compliance risks. This highlights a significant opportunity for AI to drive operational efficiency while empowering human oversight where it matters most.

These numbers highlight a major gap: Businesses are spending valuable time and money on manual scheduling tasks that AI could handle more efficiently and accurately.

The Burden of Manual Scheduling

In most frontline operations, scheduling remains a tedious and reactive process. Managers often rely on spreadsheets, historical averages, or guesswork to staff their teams. This leads to:

• Overstaffing, which inflates labor costs and eats into margins
• Understaffing, which leads to missed sales, service breakdowns, and burnout
• Unfair schedules, which frustrates employees and increases turnover
• Constant edits requiring managers to spend hours adjusting shifts, reassigning breaks, and filling last-minute callouts

These challenges only get worse as labor markets tighten, customer expectations rise, and compliance regulations become more complex, especially in today’s volatile economy and amid uncertainty around tariffs.

Manual scheduling is no longer sustainable in a high-turnover labor market with rising compliance complexity and margin pressure.

Introducing Legion AI

Legion AI is a comprehensive platform that integrates cutting-edge AI technologies alongside enterprise-grade AI infrastructure and a robust data pipeline. It enables intelligent automation across workforce management and drives critical functions within Legion WFM, such as accurate forecasting, optimized scheduling, advanced insights, and AI assistants.
Let’s look at how Legion AI transforms scheduling through three core capabilities:

1. Accurate Demand Forecasting

Accurate scheduling starts with accurate forecasting. Legion AI delivers precise labor demands down to 15-minute intervals for each demand driver at each location, something generic systems simply cannot deliver.

These forecasts are powered by over 300,000 custom-trained models that are retrained weekly using more than 1.6 billion data points. Legion automatically incorporates:

• Historical sales and transaction trends
• External events and data, like weather, holidays, and local events
  Custom events, including location-specific marketing promotions

For example, staffing for a downtown store may be automatically adjusted in response to a citywide event or sudden weather change—no manual research or guesswork required.

“Forrester Research found that Legion delivers a significant improvement in forecast accuracy, and each 1% improvement in demand forecast accuracy can lead to a .5% reduction in labor costs.”

2. Intelligent and Automated Scheduling

Once demand is forecasted, Legion uses advanced optimization techniques to turn those forecasts into ideal labor plans and schedules. Before optimization, the platform automatically factors in:

• Employee availability, preferences, and skills
• Labor standards and productivity expectations
• Compliance rules and budget constraints

Instead of retrofitting preferences after the schedule is built, Legion’s optimization engine incorporates them from the start. This drives a 96% match rate between schedules generated by Legion WFM and employee skills and preferences, reducing absenteeism, callouts, and attrition.

“Legion AI is incredible. It is able to handle so much input that we give it—whether that’s employees requesting time off or voting on their shift preferences, looking at our traffic, transactions, and net sales historical and trend data, as well as taking employee performance into the equation. It’s able to handle all of that and generate a wonderful schedule within just a few seconds.”

—Ryan Holm, Divisional VP of Retail Innovations & Operations, Helzberg

3. AI Assistants That Empower Managers

Legion AI doesn’t just analyze data and generate schedules—it also takes action. Through a range of task-specific Legion AI Assistants, Legion automates routine workforce tasks using a natural language interface.

These aren’t generic chatbots or conversational assistants. Legion AI Assistants are embedded directly into the WFM platform and designed to solve specific workforce management use cases. While Legion offers AI Assistants for a variety of workflows, including time and attendance, platform extensibility, and communications, the ones that directly support scheduling include:

• Legion AI Schedule Summary Assistant: A conversational interface that delivers insightful schedule summaries and quick answers on schedule data.
• Legion AI Shift Editing Assistant: Enables managers to efficiently make shift edits and publish updates on the go through intuitive guided flows.

These AI Assistants empower frontline managers to move faster and with less friction. Routine actions that once took multiple tools or approvals are now handled instantly, freeing up time to focus on customer service, team development, and revenue growth. You can read more about Legion AI Assistants in our latest eGuide.

“In a latest research report, Nucleus Research found that managers reduced time spent on weekly scheduling by an average of 66 to 75 percent by taking advantage of Legion’s Automated Scheduling capabilities.”

Optimize Coverage and Top-Line Revenue with Employee Productivity-Based Scheduling

Scheduling isn’t just about filling shifts; it’s about ensuring the right people work at the right time. Legion WFM goes beyond traditional scheduling by seamlessly incorporating employee productivity into schedule optimization without compromising other critical business needs, such as budgets, compliance, or employee preferences.

With Legion, businesses can:

• Instantly create optimal schedules using AI, and leverage behavioral data and employee productivity scores to assign top performers to peak times
• Provide optimal labor guidance with precise demand forecasting and labor plans tailored to business needs
• Incorporate granular employee data and inputs, including employees’ skills, preferences, and productivity metrics
• Seamlessly apply constraints such as budget limits, store hours, and staffing levels into scheduling decisions
  Automatically adhere to labor laws and company-specific staffing rules, ensuring equitable and compliant schedules

This productivity-driven approach ensures that high-impact roles are staffed by the best-fit employees during the most critical windows, without sacrificing fairness, compliance, or flexibility. The result is higher sales, improved employee satisfaction, and measurable business value.

Conclusion: Creating Perfect Schedules with Legion WFM

Legion empowers businesses to create perfect schedules by leveraging cutting-edge Legion AI to balance productivity, compliance, labor rules, budget constraints, and employee skills and preferences. With just one click, Legion Automated Scheduling generates optimized schedules that align with business goals and employee needs.

Unlike legacy systems, Legion AI processes hundreds of permutations, learns from data continuously, and utilizes precise, ML-driven demand forecasts. Legion creates the perfect schedule by automatically computing or ingesting compliance requirements, budget constraints, business rules, demand, employee productivity, skills, and preferences. Legion supports numerous scheduling methods, including static, dynamic, shift patterns, and self-service scheduling. AI is used to fully automate schedule generation and simplify ongoing management of schedules, cutting time spent on scheduling tasks in half while delivering schedules that meet both business and employee needs 96% of the time.

Legion ensures that scheduling is no longer a time-consuming burden but a strategic advantage for operational excellence, driving topline revenue and increasing employee retention.

Ready to Transform How You Schedule?

If your organization still uses outdated systems or generic tools that weren’t built for scheduling complexity, it’s time to modernize.

Schedule a demo today to see how Legion WFM can help your team automate scheduling, boost productivity, and elevate the employee experience.