Rising labor costs, unpredictable demand, and persistent shortages are reshaping how businesses in retail, hospitality, food services, and other industries with dispersed hourly workers manage their employees. Labor is the largest controllable cost for most businesses and one of the most critical drivers of customer experience. Yet, the pressure to meet revenue goals without adding headcount has never been greater.
Legacy workforce management (WFM) systems often rely on rigid rules, siloed data, and manual processes that make it difficult to maximize labor efficiency and employee engagement simultaneously. The result? Over- or understaffing, unfair shift distribution, or absenteeism due to schedules that don’t meet employee availability or preferences.
Businesses need a smarter approach, one that intelligently optimizes every labor hour. Legion AI solves this challenge.
Legion AI is a comprehensive platform that integrates cutting-edge AI technologies alongside enterprise-grade AI infrastructure and a robust data pipeline. It enables intelligent automation across workforce management and drives critical functions within workforce planning, such as accurate forecasting, optimized scheduling, advanced insights, and task-specific AI Assistants.
Here are five powerful ways Legion AI enables businesses to maximize the impact of their existing workforce:
- Intelligent Demand Forecasting
- Labor Optimization with Machine Learning
- Intelligent Scheduling: Creating the Perfect Schedule
- Productivity-based Scheduling
- Legion AI Assistants
1. Intelligent Demand Forecasting
Accurate demand forecasting is the starting point for labor optimization. Without it, businesses face over- or understaffing and other unpredictable costs.
Legion AI’s predictive engine automates the entire forecasting pipeline, from ingesting and cleansing data to training and retraining models and generating forecasts, removing unnecessary manual intervention.
Legion’s ability to generate custom models for every demand driver at each location makes it unique. These models incorporate:
- Historical sales and transaction trends
- External signals such as weather, holidays, and local events
- Custom events like location-specific promotions
This ensures accuracy down to 15-minute, 30-minute, and daily intervals, something legacy systems often fail to deliver. Feedback loops continuously refine forecasts, making them smarter and more precise over time.
Scale also matters. Legion AI trains more than 300,000 custom models each week using over 1.6 billion data points, creating highly localized forecasts that power labor plans across global operations.
For businesses, this means every forecast directly translates into the smarter use of existing staff. With Legion AI, organizations don’t need to add headcount to hit revenue targets; they can do more with the labor they already have by ensuring every schedule begins with the most accurate demand plan possible.
Did You Know?
“Forrester Research found that Legion delivers a significant improvement in forecast accuracy, and each 1% improvement in demand forecast accuracy can lead to a .5% reduction in labor costs.”
2. Labor Optimization with Machine Learning
One of the hidden costs in workforce management is unproductive labor, i.e., employees scheduled when demand is low or assigned to shifts that don’t match their skills. These wasted hours drain profitability and create inefficiencies.
Legion AI eliminates this problem by generating compact labor plans that allocate hours only where they deliver value. Its labor optimization engine, powered by mathematical models and machine learning, streamlines scheduling, minimizes costs, and maximizes workforce efficiency.
The platform balances labor standards, compliance rules, and employee preferences against real-time demand, ensuring every shift is purposeful. Employees can set their preferences for when, where, and how much they want to work, and Legion automatically incorporates those inputs before schedules are generated. This creates fairer schedules, stronger engagement, and better work-life balance.
For business leaders, the impact is clear: fewer wasted labor hours, reduced absenteeism, higher retention, and maximum ROI on existing headcount. For employees, it means consistency, transparency, and greater satisfaction.
By aligning staffing precisely with demand and employee strengths, Legion helps businesses cut waste without cutting headcount. The result is more efficient labor utilization, better shift coverage, and stronger business outcomes, proof that with Legion AI, organizations can do more with the labor they already have.
3. Intelligent Scheduling: Creating the Perfect Schedule
A perfect schedule balances business efficiency with employee satisfaction. It ensures that every labor hour contributes to revenue, service, and compliance—while honoring employee preferences.
Legion AI makes this possible by generating the most compact labor plans that meet demand. The platform factors in employee skills, certifications, preferences, productivity metrics, labor laws, budgets, and store hours to deliver efficient and fair schedules.
Instead of managers spending hours manually creating schedules, Legion produces optimized labor plans with a single click. These schedules improve service consistency, reduce overtime risk, and ensure equitable shift distribution. For business leaders, the benefit is predictable labor costs and stronger customer experience outcomes, without the need to add headcount.
By integrating all these elements into one process, Legion minimizes inefficiencies, reduces costs, and creates a better work environment for employees. The result is the perfect schedule: one that aligns labor with business goals while respecting employee needs.
AI is used to fully automate schedule generation and simplify ongoing schedule management, cutting time spent on scheduling tasks in half while delivering schedules that meet both business and employee needs 96% of the time. With just one click, Legion Automated Scheduling generates optimized schedules that align with business goals and employee needs, enabling businesses to do more with their existing labor.
Read more about the perfect schedules in our latest eBook.
4. Productivity-Based Scheduling
Most legacy scheduling systems treat all employees the same. The problem is clear: not every labor hour delivers equal business value. High-performing employees consistently drive stronger sales, provide better service, and create more consistent results.
Legion AI fixes this by calculating employee productivity in real time. Using worked minutes, completed tasks, and sales transactions, Legion creates a dynamic productivity profile for every employee. This data is fed directly into the scheduling process to prioritize top performers for high-impact shifts.
But optimization goes beyond simply clustering talent at peak hours. Some businesses want top performers spread across shifts to ensure every customer gets expert service, while others prefer to concentrate them during busy periods. Legion adapts to both approaches, even factoring in employee preferences by allowing workers to submit preferred hours.
Dynamic scheduling rules then allocate those requests to top performers using in-store rankings, balancing autonomy with performance.
A weighted Schedule Score and interactive dashboards give managers real-time visibility into how well schedules align with compliance, coverage, and employee needs. Legion AI continuously learns from these adjustments, improving outcomes over time.
The result is predictable schedules, consistent customer experience, and maximum ROI, proof that businesses can do more with the talent they already have.
Did You Know?
“In a latest research report, Nucleus Research found that managers reduced time spent on weekly scheduling by an average of 66 to 75 percent by taking advantage of Legion’s Automated Scheduling capabilities.”
5. Legion AI Assistants
One of the biggest barriers to labor optimization isn’t just scheduling—it’s the amount of time managers spend on repetitive administrative work. Legion AI Assistants solve this by automating routine tasks with precision, freeing managers to focus on activities that drive business outcomes.
Unlike generic copilots, Legion AI Assistants are task-specific, context-aware, and fully embedded within the Legion WFM platform. They use natural language interfaces to make complex workflows simple and intuitive. Examples include:
- Schedule Summary Assistant: delivers insightful summaries and answers to schedule questions
- Shift Editing Assistant: offers insights, recommended actions, and executes schedule changes
- Time and Attendance Assistant: simplifies timesheet search and filtering
- Expression Assistant: makes it easier to author, configure, and refine custom expressions that extend the platform to meet specific business needs
- Authoring Assistant: creates newsfeed content and announcements across multiple languages
By automating these tasks, Legion AI reduces the administrative burden on managers, giving them hours back every week. These saved hours can be reinvested into higher-value activities such as coaching employees, engaging customers, and increasing revenue.
The result is smarter labor allocation, stronger workforce engagement, and better business outcomes, proving that Legion AI Assistants can help businesses do more with the labor they already have.
Read more about the Legion AI Assistants in our latest eGuide.
“Because of Legion’s AI and machine learning functionality, it forecasts an ideal headcount per hour per day based on the operating hours and the traffic that’s anticipated using all historical data. Additionally, the tool continues to learn over time as we add more data. This is not something we’ve ever had before, but it’s been hugely impactful and has changed our approach to work.”
– Director, Human Resources, SMCP
Conclusion
In today’s environment, marked by rising wages, inflation, tariff uncertainty, and tightening margins, businesses must make every labor hour count. They can’t afford to leave labor efficiency or revenue potential on the table. With the mission of turning “hourly jobs into good jobs,” Legion AI supports this goal by providing the intelligence and automation to do just that, helping organizations unlock efficiency, protect margins, and boost productivity while amplifying human potential and delivering a better employee experience.
The real opportunity lies in doing more with the labor already in place. Legion AI makes this possible through intelligent scheduling, top-performer alignment, multi-location coverage, predictive planning, and eliminating unproductive hours. The result is consistent customer service, engaged employees, and measurable financial impact.
For finance, operations, and executive leaders, it’s proof that AI-driven workforce management is not just about cost control—it’s about unlocking new levels of performance, resilience, growth, and engagement.
Learn more about how Legion AI can help your business succeed in the modern business world by scheduling a demo today.
