The chat is read-only. The phone writes.
Ask Sofia answers questions about your real week in plain language. It cannot touch your schedule. The phone agent is the one that writes — see Call Sofia.
What does “grounded” mean for an AI assistant?
A grounded assistant answers from a specific set of data supplied with the question, rather than from what a language model happens to have memorised. Sofia loads your organization, positions, employees, locations and the current week’s shifts on the server, computes real figures from them, and prepends that context to the question. If the answer is not in your data, the model has nothing to answer from — which is the point.
What people actually ask it
The figures behind these answers are computed from your week server-side, not estimated by the model.
“How many open shifts this week?”
Counted from the current Monday–Sunday week across your locations, not from a stale cached view.
“What’s my labor cost this week?”
Derived from assigned shifts and real wages, the same figures the dashboard shows.
“Who’s approaching overtime?”
Built from an overtime watchlist computed over scheduled hours per person.
“Who has availability to cover?”
Answered from your team’s stored availability, so the suggestion is actionable.
“What’s listed on Cover?”
Counted from OPEN gaps you listed on Cover waitlist. Cover is not a live pool — listing records demand, nobody is sent.
Read-only, deliberately
The assistant is instructed to tell you what to do in the app rather than claim it did anything. It has no write path to your schedule at all — so it cannot reassign a shift, publish a week, or approve a request, whether or not it is asked to.
No write access to shifts, claims, punches or approvals Told to point you at the action, never to assert it performed one Manager-gated: it reads wage and labor data, so it needs the role that already sees them Questions are length-capped, and answers are kept short on purpose
It tells you when it is not the model talking
If the language model is unavailable, Sofia falls back to deterministic answers computed from the same figures — and labels them. The chat shows “Sofia AI” for a model answer and “from your data” for a computed one, so you always know which you are reading.
Every answer carries its source, shown in the conversation Fallback answers are computed, not guessed An outage degrades the wording, never the numbers Answers render through an escape-first Markdown renderer with a fixed tag set
Questions, answered
Which model does Ask Sofia use?
Google Gemini 2.5 Flash, called once per question from a Cloud Function. There is no conversation memory on the server — each question is answered against the context supplied with it.
Can it change my schedule?
The in-app chat cannot. Call Sofia — the phone agent — can, for late / call-off / directed swap, through the policy engine. This page is the read-only twin.
Who can use it?
Managers and above. The answers include labor cost and wage-derived figures, so access matches the role that can already see that data elsewhere in the product.
Is my schedule data sent to the model?
A summary of the current week is. The server assembles your organization’s positions, employees, locations and this week’s shifts into a plain-text context block, capped in size, and sends it with the question so the answer is grounded in real figures.
What happens if the AI is unavailable?
You still get an answer. Sofia computes a deterministic response from the same underlying figures and labels it “from your data” rather than “Sofia AI”, so the distinction is visible rather than hidden.
Is the rest of Sofia AI too?
Auto-Fill, forecasting and the compliance engine are deterministic algorithms — same inputs, same output. Ask Sofia (this chat) is a language model and is read-only. Call Sofia is a language model with a write path through those algorithms. We keep the distinction visible.
Explore more of Sofia
- Call Sofia
Staff call one number. Sofia covers late, sick, and Julie-take-Thursday — through the same rules as Auto-Fill.
- Rostering & Auto-Fill
See the week. Fill open shifts. Every pick is scored and reversible.
- Labor cost control
See Saturday’s labor % while you can still cut a shift. Scheduled vs actual, live.
Still short after Auto-Fill? Cover is a waitlist, not a live pool.
See CoverGet a store number, or let us show you around.
$200 a store. The line is boarding. Or open a workspace and run the roster today.