# Smart Planner: generating a schedule with AI

> Let artificial intelligence build a complete schedule proposal in a few minutes, respecting your legal constraints and your team's habits.

Source: https://help.shyfter.com/en/schedules/smart-planner-generating-a-schedule-with-ai  
Category: Schedules  
Updated: 2026-06-30

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).