How we are building AI that handles the admin so you don't have to. By Ivo Hunink, CPO at Shiftbase
You are still the glue
I talk to operators every week. Whether they schedule from a spreadsheet or a purpose-built tool, the pattern is the same: they are still the connecting tissue between everything. They remember that one employee's contract expires Friday. They know Tuesdays are short-staffed. They cross-reference timesheets before payroll, check overtime, juggle last-minute sick calls. The Sunday night scheduling panic? Good tools solved that. But the real problem is everything around it: combining information from five screens to figure out what to do next. All the small decisions that still live in your head.
One of our customers runs three coffee shops in the Netherlands. Forty-eight employees. He and his operations manager should be on the floor: welcoming guests, making sure the coffee is excellent, making sure people want to come back. Instead, they spend hours behind a screen approving timesheets and rebuilding next week's roster. Every minute on admin is a minute away from what actually matters to them.
That is the gap we are closing at Shiftbase. Not the scheduling itself. The thinking that surrounds it.
The industry added AI. The work stayed the same.
Every workforce tool now has a chatbot or an auto-schedule button. Most are black boxes: press a button, something comes out, you are not sure why. You still activate it yourself, interpret the result, do the follow-up.
We are building you an assistant
But instead of adding AI buttons, we are building an assistant that sits inside Shiftbase and actually does the admin work: connects the information across your screens, catches what you would forget, and handles the routine so you do not have to. Our north star is zero minutes of admin per day. We are getting there in steps, starting with where operators lose the most time:
Forecasting (live now) – Your sales data tells us how busy each day will be. You see exactly what this Friday looks like in terms of expected revenue, not a guess based on hope. What surprised me is that pilot customers are adopting the forecast one hundred percent of the time. It is often more accurate than the manager's own estimate, and their schedules land closer to reality than anything they could build manually.
Intelligent scheduling (rolling out 2026) – Once you know your expected revenue, Shiftbase turns that into the shifts you need and fills them: right people, right roles, optimized for cost and availability. Three hours of scheduling becomes minutes.
Your continuous assistant (the vision) – Over time, Shiftbase learns your business and starts handling admin across scheduling, time tracking, payrolling, HR, and compliance. Someone calls in sick? The assistant already knows who is available and qualified, and has reached out. You make the calls that matter. Everything else is handled.
You do not have to adopt all of this at once. Start with whichever piece helps most, build trust, and expand from there.
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We would rather be honest
Three weeks into our first pilot, a snowstorm hit the Netherlands. The forecast missed it, because snowstorms were not in the dataset. That is the reality: AI gives you a strong baseline, and the longer you work with it, the smarter it gets. We would rather tell you that than claim 86% accuracy and lose your trust the first time something is off.
Here is where this is heading
You get in your car on Monday morning. On the drive, you call your assistant to review the three remaining decisions that need your input. By the time you walk through the door, everything has been handled. Timesheets approved. Coverage sorted. Compliance checked. You spend your day on what made you start your business.
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