A Deep Dive into Legion’s Gen AI Assistants
February 5, 2025
by Naman Gupta
The nature of work is evolving, and workforce management (WFM) must evolve with it. For businesses managing hourly workers in labor-intensive industries, simplifying complex operations while offering intuitive, personalized support is no longer optional—it’s essential.
Enter Legion AI, a comprehensive platform that integrates cutting-edge AI technologies alongside enterprise-grade AI infrastructure and data pipeline. It enables intelligent automation across workforce management and drives critical functions within Legion Workforce Management (WFM), such as accurate forecasting, optimized scheduling, advanced insights, and conversational assistants.
Hourly workers often lack the technical expertise to navigate complex tools, making the adoption of a new technology challenging. We believe Agentic AI has the potential to offload significant tasks from humans, allowing them to focus on higher-value work instead.
Agentic AI is particularly well-suited for applications where the set of tasks is bounded in scope but involves numerous variations that cannot be precisely predefined. We have successfully applied Agentic AI to implement several highly contextual Gen AI assistants, each designed for a specific task within different areas of our application. In contrast to other approaches of a global “copilot” that attempts to handle everything, our approach focuses on deploying multiple specialized Gen AI assistants, Scheduling, Time and Attendance, Communications, and Extensibility Expressions—each tailored to a specific need.
By situating each assistant within its relevant workflow, we’ve ensured each delivers precise, task-specific support through intuitive, natural language interfaces, enabling users to perform their tasks more efficiently and easily, even on the go.
How Legion Defines Gen AI
Generative AI is a subset of artificial intelligence that can generate synthetic tabular data and create high-quality content, including text, images, code, audio, and videos. The generative AI process begins with training on diverse datasets—such as text, images, or other data types—allowing the model to understand language, visuals, and context. Through this training, the model learns to recognize and replicate patterns, generating outputs that closely align with given prompts.
Why Generative AI?
Large language models possess a vast amount of general knowledge. They can be readily trained to perform various tasks, create novel content, provide a conversational interface, and perform tasks to create new and high-quality content. Generative AI also offers the flexibility of fine-tuning, allowing models to be adapted for specific tasks as needed, ensuring greater accuracy and relevance in their applications.
Challenges with Gen AI
A well-known challenge with generative AI is managing bias and minimizing hallucinated responses. Some of the most popular generative AI tools—including new ChatGPT models—can now access real-time web data. However, even with this improvement, generative AI can still produce inaccurate, outdated, or misleading information, known as a “hallucination,” where the AI generates responses that sound convincing but are actually false. Hallucinations occur because the AI generates content based on patterns in its training data without a true understanding of the information.
Legion AI adopts a graduated approach to address this challenge, where each AI assistant tolerates a different margin of error based on its specific use case. Each assistant employs tailored error-checking techniques and accuracy improvement methods suited to its function. A key factor in achieving this is that each assistant has a well-defined scope—by focusing on a specific workflow, the assistant’s response accuracy is greatly improved. The assistants’ responses are grounded in Legion-specific context, ensuring relevance and precision. This approach enhances accuracy and makes user adoption seamless by providing assistance exactly when and where it is needed.
Legion AI continuously evolves, with tracking implicit and explicit user feedback critical in refining its capabilities. Users can submit feedback through thumbs-up or thumbs-down ratings and include additional comments to improve response quality. When generative AI is in use, we provide clear notice to the end users within the user interface and encourage them to review and verify all AI-generated outputs to make informed decisions.
How Does Legion Gen AI Ensure Data Security?
Legion Generative AI is restricted to accessing the Legion application based on the user’s security credentials, ensuring that the AI assistants only have access to the data and permissions that the user has. It cannot provide answers based on data that the user cannot access or perform actions on the user’s behalf unless the user has access permission to perform that action. Admins and managers can configure and grant access permission to access roles (e.g., store manager, team member) and turn on/off Gen AI features via the Control Center configuration as needed.
This blog will further explore Legion’s Generative AI Assistants, showcasing how we’ve blended innovation, scalability, and usability to create a suite of assistants for workforce management.
1. Schedule Assistant
Legion’s State of the Hourly Workforce 2024 Report highlighted that employee scheduling is the #1 task managers wish were intelligently automated. Legion’s Schedule Assistant addresses this need with a conversational interface designed to analyze schedules, provide insights, and recommend actions. Leveraging advanced AI algorithms, the Schedule Assistant enables managers to:
- Identify actionable insights into scheduling gaps and compliance issues
- Make real-time adjustments to adapt to changing operational needs and external demand drivers
Managers can efficiently perform tasks like retrieving a weekly summary, conducting data lookups, or editing, adding, deleting, and publishing schedules. For instance, they can ask questions such as, “Who is scheduled this week?” or “What shifts does John have this week or next week?” It allows managers to focus less on manual scheduling and more on strategic decision-making.
Imagine a busy retail store manager preparing for a weekend sale. With the Schedule Assistant, they can quickly pull up an AI-generated summary of the upcoming week and identify open shifts. The manager notices gaps during peak hours and uses the auto-fill feature to assign shifts based on employee availability and skills. If a senior associate suddenly calls in sick, the manager can immediately identify available replacements or publish the shift for bids, ensuring seamless operations without scrambling.
2. Expression Assistant
Workforce management systems often require highly customized configurations to address unique and evolving business needs. However, configuring these expressions can be complex and challenging, especially for non-technical users. Legion’s Expression Assistant simplifies this process by allowing workforce management teams to define “Legion Expressions”—custom expressions that extend the platform’s functionality. The expressions support tasks such as labor rule customization, compliance management across jurisdictions, report generation, and more.
The Expression Assistant is designed to:
- Provide contextual explanations and guidance during the configuration process to simplify complex workflows
- Help with authoring and troubleshooting expressions, removing the need for extensive technical expertise
By addressing the challenges of creating and managing custom expressions, the Expression Assistant empowers managers to configure Legion WFM confidently to meet unique and dynamic needs, ensuring operational efficiency while adapting seamlessly to evolving business requirements.
Consider a scenario where a company wants to compensate hourly employees at 1.5x their daily wage for working on a holiday, provided that the employee has not taken any other days off around the holiday as paid leave. Traditionally, configuring such custom pay rules could be complex and prone to errors. However, with Legion’s Expression Assistant, administrators can ask the assistant to help write the expression and provide detailed validation and explanation. As a result, administrators save time, avoid manual errors, and ensure fair compensation practices while employees experience equitable treatment that boosts engagement and trust.
3. Authoring Assistant
Boosting employee engagement and retaining hourly workers requires consistent, high-quality communication between workers and managers. Sharing kudos, updates, and news fosters a sense of community, strengthens workplace culture, and reduces attrition among hourly workers. At Legion, we’ve always focused on improving employee engagement and ensuring employees have timely updates about products, services, and policy information to perform their work effectively.
Legion’s Authoring Assistant helps managers and frontline communications teams create clear and engaging Newsfeed posts and Announcements. It saves time while ensuring messages are engaging and aligned with organizational goals. The Authoring Assistant helps to:
- Facilitate the creation of multilingual Newsfeed posts and Announcements
- Ensure messages are engaging, consistent, and aligned with organizational goals
- Support rapid dissemination of critical updates across teams
This assistant enables businesses to maintain seamless communication, improving message quality and increasing engagement, all while simplifying the content creation process.
Imagine a manager needing to inform employees about a new holiday policy. With the Authoring Assistant, the manager selects ‘Create Announcement,’ enters a brief description of the update, and clicks ‘Generate.’ The assistant instantly drafts an engaging and professional message tailored to the topic. Alternatively, if the manager has drafted a message but wants to enhance its tone or clarity, they can use the ‘Improve’ button to refine it. The manager can review and edit the final message before sending it, ensuring that employees receive clear, timely, and engaging communication. This efficiency and precision empower managers with a built-in writing and communication coach, allowing them to focus on strategic priorities while ensuring teams stay informed and engaged.
4. Translation Assistant
Language diversity presents both opportunities and challenges in today’s global workforce. Frontline workers who receive communications in non-native languages may struggle to fully understand key messages, hindering their ability to perform tasks effectively. This gap in understanding impacts individual performance, can affect broader business outcomes, and reduces employee engagement.
Legion’s Translation Assistant is designed to bridge this gap. The assistant automatically detects when a Newsfeed Post, Comment, or Announcement is in a language different from the employee’s preferred language and provides a seamless option to view either the translated or original message.
The Translation Assistant ensures effective communication by:
- Enabling employees to access team communications in their preferred language
- Enhancing collaboration and inclusivity across multilingual teams
- Ensuring that messages retain their original intent and tone, regardless of the language
Consider an hourly worker whose preferred language is French, working in a global organization where company announcements are often made in English. When the Translation Assistant is enabled in the Legion mobile app, the worker will see a ‘Translate to [my preferred language]’ link when they view a newsfeed post, newsfeed comment, or announcement sent in a language different from their preferred language. The worker’s preferred language is detected automatically based on the employee’s language setting in the Legion mobile app. The message is translated into French with one click, retaining its original tone and meaning.
This functionality ensures that every team member feels informed, connected, and valued—no matter their location or language preference—fostering a more inclusive workplace where communication barriers are a thing of the past.
5. Time and Attendance Assistant
Accurate time tracking and payroll processing are essential for ensuring smooth operations, but payroll administrators face significant challenges in validating timesheets. From assessing regular, overtime, and holiday hours to ensuring compliance with labor laws, the process often involves cumbersome and time-consuming manual searches.
Legion’s Time and Attendance Assistant addresses these challenges by enabling a natural language interface that translates users’ queries into Legion timesheet filter expressions. Payroll managers can review and modify the generated expressions to ensure they meet specific search criteria, making the process faster and more intuitive while ensuring accuracy.
The Time and Attendance Assistant simplifies payroll management by:
- Allowing payroll managers to search and filter timesheets using natural language queries
- Providing real-time insights into time and attendance data to identify discrepancies
- Ensuring compliance with labor laws and organizational policies
Imagine a payroll administrator who needs to validate timesheets for hourly employees who worked overtime on a holiday. Instead of manually searching, the administrator uses the Legion’s Time and Attendance Assistant and simply types, “Show all employees who worked overtime on holidays last week.” The assistant translates this query into a timesheet filter expression and retrieves the relevant results instantly. The administrator can then review and refine the search criteria if needed.
This streamlined process eliminates the guesswork and manual effort typically associated with payroll management. The Time and Attendance Assistant helps businesses ensure accuracy, compliance, and confidence in their payroll operations by empowering administrators to access actionable insights easily.
Each of Legion’s Generative AI Assistants is designed to solve a specific workforce management challenge. However, the true power of Legion AI lies in how these assistants work seamlessly together, creating a unified ecosystem that transforms workforce management. Together, they streamline operations through intelligent automation, enhance productivity by reducing administrative burdens, and improve employee experiences through better communication and scheduling.
On-the-Go Efficiency for Deskless Workers
Time and mobility are critical in industries where hourly workers are the backbone of operations. Managers and hourly employees don’t always have the luxury of sitting at a desk to manage schedules, resolve conflicts, or execute tasks. Legion’s conversational Gen AI assistants seamlessly integrate into the Legion WFM workflow, providing real-time assistance directly through mobile devices. This mobile-first approach allows workers to make adjustments on the go—whether it’s swapping shifts, getting updates from managers, or setting and updating shift preferences—ensuring that the workforce remains agile and responsive, even in the field.
The Future of Intelligent Workforce Management Is Here with Legion AI
Legion’s commitment to generative AI goes beyond just the current offerings. While Legion currently offers a range of Gen AI assistants, this is just the beginning. Our roadmap envisions an expansive ecosystem of purpose-built generative AI agents, each designed to address specific workforce management needs. Legion’s Gen AI Assistants showcase the power of AI-driven innovation in workforce management. They don’t just automate tasks—they redefine what’s possible in WFM, enabling businesses to thrive in an ever-changing landscape.
Whether you’re looking to optimize schedules, enhance communication, or streamline compliance, Legion’s Gen AI Assistants are ready to help you achieve your goals. It’s time to embrace the future of work with assistants created to make every aspect of workforce management smarter, faster, and more effective.
This is more than just innovation—it’s the future of intelligent workforce management powered by Legion AI.
Discover how Legion AI can transform your organization. Schedule a demo today!