Deputy, the intuitive, people platform built specifically for shift work, celebrated a milestone in March, with more than 1 billion shifts scheduled through its platform.
Deputy reached its first 500 million shifts in 2023, after nearly 15 years of building the operating system for shift-based work. Just three years later, that number has doubled – reflecting a meaningful inflection in adoption as workforce complexity increases and businesses standardise on platforms built to operate at scale.
Since its founding in 2008, Deputy has evolved from replacing manual scheduling into a unified workforce operating system that underpins operations across scheduling, labour efficiency and retention, compliance, time tracking, communication, and payroll. Today, it operates across diverse regulatory environments globally, supporting businesses where labour is dynamic, regulated, and operationally critical.
This depth and duration of data, spanning nearly two decades and now over one billion shifts, has become a structural advantage as AI moves from experimentation to implementation.
With the introduction of Deputy AI, the platform is transitioning from workflow automation to embedded intelligence. Scheduling is no longer a static task, but a dynamic system that interprets demand signals, applies complex labour regulations, incorporates worker preferences, and continuously adapts in real time. What historically required hours of coordination is increasingly handled by systems that can optimise for cost, compliance, and workforce experience simultaneously.
“One billion shifts represents nearly two decades of accumulated understanding of how frontline work actually operates at scale,” said Silvija Martincevic, CEO of Deputy.
“Globally, 80% of workers operate on shift-based schedules. This is how the world runs, and it is a part of the workforce that has historically been underserved by technology. That is the problem Deputy was built to solve.”
While much of the AI narrative has centred on knowledge work, the frontline economy represents the majority of the global workforce and operates under fundamentally different constraints: real-time demand, regulatory complexity, and tight coupling between labour decisions and revenue outcomes. These are not problems that bolt-on AI tools solve. They require intelligence built into the system itself. Reaching one billion shifts marks a clear transition point: from building software for scheduling to powering the autonomous planning, execution, and continuous optimisation of frontline operations.
