The Future of Rota Planning with Artificial Intelligence

With recent AI advances it's clear that almost every industry is going to be affected greatly. The process of building rotas will be no exception, and we've been thinking a lot about how we can incorporate it in our rota planner software.

But there are a few things that are holding us back from having AI fully plan our rotas.

So how will AI affect rota planning?

Of-course in our ideal world AI would plan all of our shift schedules and require zero human intervention.

The ultimate rota setup looks something like:

• AI will create all of our shift schedules based on the historical staff demands of the business
• Any staff change requests will go to the AI which will automatically adjust the schedule
• Money

The benefits

And the benefits we would reap include:

• Extremely efficient & streamlined process with almost 0 manager time required
• Zero errors in the rota
• Increased foresight that comes with analysing large data troves
• Rapid adjustments that calculate the second best option
• Highly optimised for contractual hours, employee shift preferences and annual leave etc

Both the employer and the staff benefit from being able to work their preferred time slots more often while the employee skills are automatically matched up ensuring productivity and low down time within the business.

This all sounds great in practice but how do we get there? What do we need to put in place?

The problems with using AI for rota planning

The first thing to note is that AI is not magic, it needs extremely clear guidelines of what it needs to produce for it to be effective.

To achieve our example of the dream outcome we would need to feed the AI a ton of data about:

• Historical shift patterns
• Staff skills, availability, preferences and attendance
• Business staffing requirements over time
• The roles which need doing within the business
• The business policies on changes, lead times etc

All this data will need to be organised and fed into the AI to achieve any kind of decent results.

Now we could make estimates and guess a lot of this information but the result might not be very good, in which case manual planning would possibly be more effective.

How we're using AI at RotaPlanner.app

We're really keen to utilise AI as much as possible in our platform, it is going to be hard work though.

We've recently been experimenting with using AI to suggest assignments to shifts you're creating. This works by using the historical data you have in the system to consider the most appropriate employee to assign to the current shift.

This is of-course just the start of our plans to integrate AI within our platform but it's a good starting point to test out how well AI performs for shift planning needs.

If you're in search of a rota planner to invest in that has AI front of mind, you should definitely try out our platform.

Start sharing your shifts with RotaPlanner today

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We're keen to push the boundaries of tech and provide the best possible solutions for simplifying the rota process.

It's clear that AI will play a pivotal role in providing our customers with a more efficient, accurate, and reliable scheduling process.

It's not all about high tech though, we're also focused on making our app experience as simple and intuitive as possible along with providing the best customer support when needed.

Give us a try and see what you think!

Your thoughts on AI in rota planning?

What do you think about how AI could improve rota planning? We'd love to hear your thoughts!