Microsoft Part 3: How AI Streamlines Scheduling and Onboarding for Frontline Teams

0:04Welcome back to Voices from the Frontline AI in action in partnership with Microsoft. I'm Ron Thurston, and in this episode, we explore one of the biggest opportunities in frontline work today, using AI to simplify complex processes like scheduling, onboarding, and real-time learning across multigenerational and multilingual teams. I'm joined again by Abby Sweeney and Irina Parsina, who share how intelligent tools like Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365 are reducing complexity, improving flexibility, and helping every worker access information in a way that works best for them. So let's jump back in.

0:50We might have, you know, operations or HR people now thinking, wait, so I have to create different content for all my employees? No, no, no, you can create one content. And then it's just about how the users consume it. They can consume it how they like. And I think you make a really good point about the multi-generational. And my mum might tell me off for saying this, but she's not a spring chicken coming into the earlier end of the workforce, but she's a nurse. And I showed her how to use Copilot when I was at home last. And she now uses it to help with her meeting transcripts when she's taking notes.

1:26She helps generate emails for her, all different types of things to allow her to have more time with her patients. So I think it's a really great point that you're making of the multi-generational, also the kind of multi-linguistic as well. The ability to communicate in whatever style and language that you like is a huge, huge plus for this platform. Absolutely. That's fascinating. And so I want to take it one step further and think about this around field scheduling and Dynamics 365 arena, because this has always been, in any frontline workforce, creating, optimizing a schedule, whether your team is five people or, you know, I ran Apple stores that had hundreds of people on staff, creating that level of efficient, effective, and flexible schedule.

2:21is incredibly complicated. So how are you solving that today? Because this pain point is really painful. I know, I can still see the pain on your face. Oh, yeah. As far as, yeah, no. So we hear this all the time. And I think actually the term that I hear often is this cognitive load. It's just too much. It's too much of the management, but it's equally too much on the employees that are needing to be scheduled. And it feels like whilst there is a need for flexibility, there's also a need for predictability, and there's also a need for sort of structure because I really need to manage my resourcing really well.

3:06And so, and let's be honest, a lot of the systems that are kind of powering the world, the monolith that are there, that are powering scheduling, resource management, they're there and they're structured and the way they're structured for a reason. But that doesn't mean that you can't have the flexibility that you're looking for. And this is where these sort of latest innovations across Dynamics 365, across Microsoft 365, are really making it possible for you not to necessarily kind of leave all of that behind and start from scratch, but it's actually bringing that layer above, that intelligence layer that picks up the skills that I need, picks up the demand, looks at the schedule, looks at other things like I have a customer example where they really struggle with the benefits aspect.

3:59So they have sort of this incredible benefit system. But employees, you really needed to have a PhD for you to manage this effectively because you needed to do certain hours in order to stay eligible. and then because they had sort of weird contracts and they needed to pick up the hours and then the managers also wanted to have people picking up extra shifts and so that you have these sort of varying problems and a lot of it, whilst it seems simple, but you kind of add this all up, it's a lot of complexity and it's definitely a lot of complexity for humans who are having to pull those schedules together looking at static calendars.

4:35And so this intelligence is able to bring all of those signals in and actually create something that is really tailored, suitable for what it is that you're looking for. So as a manager you are looking for, instead of me kind of manually dragging things around, I can ask the questions such as, what's my resourcing plan looking like? Am I in a good shape for the next month? Are we good to cover the sort of the, let's say there's been a demand, an extra demand, and we have a lot of tickets coming in, a lot of service requests. are we actually okay to cover it? And if so, it can come back and say, actually, no, you are missing the forward, you know, your capacity isn't quite great.

5:17And then I can say, well, help me pick the right colleagues with the right skills to make sure that I have the right capacity and the right coverage. So it's really optimized towards the outcome that you're looking for as a schedule kind of creative manager, but also on the sort of employee side and this example around benefits, you should see the joy in people's faces when they're no longer having to use 25 million bits of paper and an Excel spreadsheet to manage their eligibility by just sort of asking, you know, if I continue working in this way, am I going to be eligible for my dental care?

5:54And it can easily say, I really, you're doing fine, but just to be on the safe side, because some things come up, like maybe you'll need to take some time off. Why don't you pick up a couple of extra shifts? And by the way, here they are. So you can just request them and it goes straight to Ron. And so Ron is happy and doesn't have the scars going forward from all of the taxing cognitive light. But yeah, so exciting things are coming and exciting things are already there. And we're seeing that really transforming the way the way people operate in the field. It's fascinating. And because the other piece of it is, dynamic as any frontline business is.

6:37You mentioned tickets coming in, same, holiday promotions. Web ran a company that fulfilled the majority of their orders from stores. So if all of a sudden Web ran 40 off all full-price merchandise, the order volume in stores shot through the roof. And so there's this idea of flexible scheduling, on-demand scheduling, Business is trending up, business trending down. Like the schedule, I keep going back to this because it's so complex, but it's so critical to the financial success and profitability of every single four-wall business. And the more tools you write, like managing individual requests can be solved, business predicting, sales productivity, staffing needs.

7:26Hey, you know, learning how many people I would need to hire for the holiday season, for example like all of this can be solved with ai and where i like this conversation is you know how do what are the tools that frontline could do immediately if you solve scheduling you have solved a gigantic pain point for any hospitality you know hospital frontline retail business yeah yeah yeah and i think if if i could i know we're sticking on scheduling here quite heavily but i think as you say it's such a big mammoth area for all frontline workers and i think the other piece is we see especially in retail we have seasonal hires right who will come in just for the holidays or for a certain period and having to spend time training them getting them up to speed and it's a lot of cost it's a lot of time if we could like make that shorter make it more efficient we would have a much happier workforce much happier customers and so i think that's another place you know on on par with scheduling but it's the onboarding piece if we could just rather than saying hey you have to sit through a 10-hour workshop on how to uh do this um retail job is actually hey we'll give you an agent and you can go ahead and when you have questions you go ask it ask it the questions and it will give you an answer rather than having to leaf through a 10-page pdf document to find where that one piece of information is so i think that's like another cool piece that this type of platform can bring into that.

9:00Exactly right. Sorry, Irina, go ahead. No, I just want to actually, and it goes back to this idea of iterative because on the scheduling, one of the interesting things that I've recently seen is chatting to a manager, because as you mentioned, this on-demand scheduling is needed, but it's so hard to implement in practice because of various reasons, because you sort of need flexibility, but predictability and all those systems behind and making it really hard to offer that flexibility. But an interesting angle that came up recently is I was discussing this with a team lead, somebody who's scheduling for their store and they have a huge store.

9:45And they said that one of the things they really struggle with is it's almost like they own human factor because when they're getting requests for extra shifts, they're not able to confidently say that they're not prioritizing one employee over another. And so this idea of, and one of the things we were discussing is an agent that helps her make a decision. Thanks for joining us and a huge thank you to Abby and Irina for breaking down how AI is reshaping some of the toughest challenges in frontline operations, from smarter, more equitable scheduling to faster onboarding and support that adapts to every worker's needs.

10:25What we're seeing is a future where frontline teams move with more clarity, confidence, and capacity than ever before. I'm Ron Thurston, and we'll see you in the next conversation.