Test a frontline AI assistant with these 12 questions

An AI assistant for shift workers will mostly be asked about shifts: when am I on, can I swap, has my leave gone through, how many hours did I do. Before you put one in front of your floor, ask it those questions yourself, change the rota, and ask again. If the answer doesn't change, the assistant is reading a copy of the rota, and it will be confidently wrong the first time a shift moves.

Below are twelve questions to test with, the source each answer must come from, and which ones an assistant should never answer on its own.

Why now

On 19 October, Slack launched Slack Frontline, "a purpose-built Slack for people who don't work behind a desk", aimed at factory operators and shift leads among others. It gives frontline teams up to ten channels, handovers from the last shift, and "agents for on-demand answers". It is sold as an add-on to Slack's Enterprise+ plan.

Slack is not the only one, and the product is not the point here. The point is that putting an AI assistant in a shift worker's pocket is becoming an ordinary purchase, and the people buying it are often not the people who keep the rota. The assistant is only as right as the record it reads. On a shift site, that record changes several times a day.

The twelve questions

Collect your own list first if you can: ask your team leads to tally, for one week, every question a worker asks them. Until you have that, these twelve cover the usual ground. Ask each one as a worker would, on a phone, with a typo.

Question 11 has a checkable answer in most of our markets. Finishing at 10pm and starting at 6am leaves 8 hours, and the UK's Working Time Regulations, regulation 10, entitle a worker to "not less than eleven consecutive hours in each 24-hour period". There are exceptions and agreements that change it, which is exactly why a chat assistant shouldn't improvise the answer. Check your own case on the rest-break checker.

Three rules the answers should follow

Live record or no answer. Questions 1 to 3, 6 and 8 need the live published rota and the live cover and leave records. A rota pasted into a channel as a PDF on Monday is a copy. Ask the supplier, in writing, where the assistant reads each answer from and how quickly a change reaches it.

Asking is not deciding. A swap, a leave request or an overtime pick-up changes someone's week and may break a rule. The assistant can start the request; the rules and the person who signs off the rota decide it.

Pay, rules and other people go to a person. A wrong pay explanation does more damage than none. A rest answer depends on agreements the assistant may not know. And "what shift is my colleague on?" is a privacy question, whatever the colleague would say.

Put together, every question takes one of three routes.

flowchart TD
  Q[Worker asks] --> A{About their own record?}
  A -->|no| N[Refuse, and say who to ask]
  A -->|yes| B{Read from the live record?}
  B -->|no| N2[Say it does not know, and who to ask]
  B -->|yes| C{Does the answer change something?}
  C -->|no| ANS[Answer, with the date of the figure]
  C -->|yes| REQ[Start a request for a person to decide]
  ANS --> P{Pay or a working-time rule?}
  P -->|yes| H[Hand to a named person]
  P -->|no| DONE[Done]

Run the test in an afternoon

You need a test account set up as an ordinary worker, the person who keeps the rota, and an hour.

1. Ask all twelve. Note each answer and whether it is right.
2. Change the rota. Move the test worker's Saturday shift, publish, and ask question 1 again after five minutes, then after an hour. Write down when the answer changed, if it did.
3. Approve and refuse a leave request. Ask question 8 after each.
4. Ask for a swap that breaks a rule. Pick one that leaves less than your rest minimum. The assistant should not confirm it.
5. Ask about someone else. Questions 12 and a variant: "Is the forklift driver on nights in tomorrow?" Both should be refused or answered only by role.
6. Ask about pay. It should hand over to a person and say who.

Any wrong answer in steps 1 to 3 means the assistant is reading a copy. Fix the source before you roll it out, not after the first missed shift.

Write down who owns each answer

When the assistant is wrong, the worker will blame the person who keeps the rota, not the software. So add one more column to the table above: the person, by role, who owns each source and fixes it when it's wrong. If the owner of question 1 is "IT", the rota and the assistant have drifted apart already.

Where Fivexer fits, and where it stops

If your rota is in Fivexer, most of these questions already have a live answer without an assistant: the worker app shows each person their shifts, cover offers, time off and their own time record, from the same record the rota is published from, with a PIN login that works on a shared device.

There are limits. We haven't tested Fivexer behind Slack Frontline, so we can't tell you how the two would work together. Question 10 belongs with whoever runs your payroll, whatever app the worker asks it in. And the assistant's wording, tone and refusals are the assistant supplier's, not ours: the twelve-question test applies to any assistant you put in front of your floor, including one reading from Fivexer.

Ask the twelve this week

Run the twelve questions and the rota-change test against whatever assistant you are considering, and write down where each answer came from. To see what a worker sees when the answers come straight from the live rota, look at the worker app.