Before you demo another rostering platform or sign up for another scheduling tool, there is one question worth asking first.
Here is a scenario that plays out in small businesses all the time. A cafe owner, a clinic manager, a retail operator, someone who runs a team of shift workers, decides it is time to get smarter about how they manage the roster. They do their research, pick a tool, pay for it, roll it out, and then watch their team greet it with a wall of indifference, quiet resistance, or outright complaints. The technology works fine. The adoption does not. And the owner is left wondering what went wrong.
According to Deputy’s 2026 Big Shift Report, what went wrong probably had nothing to do with the tool itself. It had everything to do with what was already happening in the workplace before the tool arrived.
Workers who have those things, Deputy calls them poly-advantaged workers, are actively using AI to coordinate their schedules, manage availability across multiple jobs, and find new income opportunities. Just 37% of this group push back on AI at all. Workers who do not have those things, facing unpredictable rosters, volatile income, and little say over their hours, want nothing to do with it. Nearly two thirds of them, 63%, say they do not want AI anywhere near their workplace.
And here is the part worth sitting with: these are not two different groups of people. They are the same workers, in different workplaces, having completely different experiences of the same technology.
Ciaran Hale, Chief Technology Officer at Deputy, puts it directly. “Poly-employment is not the issue. It is the conditions surrounding it,” he said. “When workers have predictable schedules, clear communication, and control over their time, they see AI as a tool. Without that, it becomes a source of stress.” He adds: “This is not a story about part-time versus full-time. It is about whether workplaces are designed to support people who are already managing multiple jobs. The same worker can be pro-AI or anti-AI depending on that experience.”
Why this is especially relevant right now
Australia’s workforce has shifted considerably. Multiple job holding has hit a decade high, and Gen Z workers now account for 72% of all poly-employed shift workers in the country. That means a significant portion of the people working in your cafe, your clinic, your store, are already managing another job somewhere else. They are juggling two rosters, two sets of expectations, two employers. The predictability you offer them, or do not offer them, sits in direct comparison to what they are experiencing elsewhere.
The Deputy data shows this plays out differently across industries. In retail, more than half of Australian businesses, 52.1%, are already using AI tools including point-of-sale systems and automated upselling, ahead of comparable adoption rates in the United States. Self-service kiosks are now in place in 33.8% of Australian stores. For small retailers whose workers are watching large employers replace roles with technology, introducing new tools without addressing underlying workplace conditions is likely to land badly, no matter how good the product is.
In healthcare, the picture is more complicated. The sector has one of the highest poly-employment rates at 7.5%, and while headcount is growing, Deputy’s data suggests many workers are staying in their roles not because conditions have improved but because there simply are not enough replacements available. Australia also lags the United States significantly on administrative AI adoption, with 44.4% of providers using tools like voice-to-text and workflow automation, compared to 58.1% across the border. For small medical and allied health operators, this gap represents a genuine opportunity to reduce the admin burden on already stretched staff, but the window for getting the introduction right is narrow.
In hospitality, evening and night shifts are growing strongly, with Brisbane recording the most sustained increase in activity and Perth seeing sharp late-stage acceleration. But hiring has softened. Businesses are holding on to the staff they have and focusing any technology investment on rostering efficiency rather than expanding teams. That makes sense, but it also raises the stakes on how those tools are introduced.
The order of operations matters
Think about it this way. If someone on your team already feels like they have no control over when they work, introducing a new AI system that gives you, the owner or manager, even more visibility and control over the schedule is not going to feel like progress to them. It is going to feel like the opposite. The technology is not the problem. The context it walks into is.
Hale is straightforward about this. “The industries under the most pressure are also where better use of AI can have the biggest impact,” he said. “But the foundation has to be right. AI cannot fix unpredictability on its own. It has to work alongside fair scheduling, transparency, and empowerment of workers.”
Earlier research from Deputy found that 81% of shift workers are willing to use AI in principle, but only around one in four have received any proper training on it. That gap between openness and readiness is exactly where rollouts fall apart. Workers are not the blocker. Preparation is.
Next steps
Before the next tool, before the demo, before the subscription, ask the simpler questions first. Do your workers know their shifts with enough notice to plan around them? Do they have a real way to flag their availability? Do they understand how decisions about their hours get made, and do they feel like they have any say in it? If the honest answers are no, or not really, then a new scheduling platform is not going to fix that. It will just make the existing tension more visible and more frequent.
The businesses getting the most out of workforce AI, according to the Deputy data, are not necessarily the ones spending the most on technology. They are the ones that sorted out the basics of how they treat their people first. Predictable hours. Clear communication. A workplace where staff feel like their time is respected. Once those things are in place, the technology tends to land well. Without them, it tends to make things worse.
For small business owners who can move quickly and talk directly to their teams, this is actually good news. The advantage is not in the software. It is in the relationship. And that is something a large employer with hundreds of staff and layers of management will always struggle to replicate. Fix the foundation first. Then buy the tool.
The full report is available on this link
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