Smart Planner: generating a schedule with AI

Building a schedule every week takes time. You have to juggle availabilities, skills, legal constraints, everyone's preferences, and fairness between collaborators. The Smart Planner automates this work: in a few minutes, it generates a complete schedule proposal that you only have to review and adjust.

It is an assistant, not a replacement: you always keep control and the final decision.

Why use the Smart Planner?

• Considerable time saving: a schedule for a whole team in a few minutes instead of several hours.
• Automatic respect of legal constraints: minimum rest of 11h, maximum 6 consecutive days, weekly hours cap.
• Planning based on your habits: the AI analyses your history to reproduce the patterns that work in your establishment.
• Fairness between collaborators: fair distribution of shifts, including the demanding slots (evenings, weekends).
• Unavailabilities taken into account: leave, absences and unavailabilities entered in Shyfter are automatically respected.

Enabling the Smart Planner

Go to Settings → Schedules → Smart Planner and turn on the Enable the Smart Planner toggle.

Then configure the settings to suit your needs:

• Default prompt: a natural-language instruction to guide the AI (e.g. "Create a balanced schedule, prioritising permanent staff on weekends").
• History analysed: the number of months of history the AI takes into account (1 to 24 months; 3 months by default).
• Active modules: sections, skills, cost optimisation, fairness, rotation of demanding schedules, etc.
• Constraints: respect of contractual hours, availabilities, legal rules.

Launching a generation

1. Go to Schedules → Schedule management.
2. Navigate to the week to plan.
3. Click the Generate with AI button at the top right of the schedule.

A panel opens on the right. The generation runs through 8 successive steps displayed in real time: history analysis, trends, forecasts, availabilities, legal constraints, budget, compatibility, shift creation.

You can watch the schedule fill up as it goes, live.

Reading the results

At the end of the generation, a summary is displayed:

• Number of shifts created and number of collaborators scheduled.
• Health score out of 100: green (80-100) if the schedule is excellent, orange (60-79) if a few points deserve attention, red below 60.
• Alerts: the significant violations (hours exceeded, insufficient rest) and the information items (free shift created, collaborator not available).
• Positive points: what is compliant and well scheduled.

Click OK, generation complete to confirm and close the panel.

Recognising AI-generated shifts

Shifts created by the Smart Planner are identifiable by their dotted green border and a purple badge (AI symbol) in the schedule. This badge disappears automatically if you modify the shift manually.

After the generation

The generated shifts are not published yet. Review the schedule, adjust what needs adjusting, then publish.

For best results, make sure leave and absences are up to date before launching a generation, and that your collaborators' contracts are correctly configured (hours per week, sections, skills).