At this year’s Quinyx Navigate event in Stockholm, leaders from different industries and geographies came together to explore what it takes to run frontline operations in a world shaped by volatility, rising expectations, and rapid technological change.
Across keynotes, customer discussions, analyst insights, and product vision sessions, several themes emerged – from the growing role of AI in workforce management, to the importance of data quality and governance, the rise of human-led automation, and the need to balance operational efficiency with employee trust and experience.
One challenge sat at the centre of almost every discussion: frontline leaders are being asked to make more decisions, more quickly, in environments that are becoming harder to predict. Labour shortages, fluctuating demand, rising compliance pressures, and changing employee expectations are forcing organisations to rethink how workforce decisions are made.
In his opening keynote, Quinyx CEO and founder Erik Fjellborg focused on the operational reality facing frontline organisations.
“You're running operations where a single mistake – one missed shift, one compliance gap, one scheduling error – can have a huge impact on your business.”
Against that backdrop, Erik argued that AI in workforce management has moved beyond experimentation. The conversation is no longer about whether AI can support workforce operations, but how organisations deploy it safely, reliably, and at scale.
The shift is also redefining the role of workforce management itself – from an operational support function into a system that helps organisations make faster, more confident decisions in increasingly complex environments.
He outlined four major pressures driving that shift: labour unpredictability, demand volatility, increasing regulation, and rising employee expectations. Together, they are creating a level of operational complexity that manual processes increasingly struggle to manage.
That complexity is accelerating the shift away from reactive workforce management. Reporting becomes forecasting. Manual scheduling becomes optimisation. Managers spend less time building schedules from scratch and more time reviewing, refining, and leading their teams.
AI is increasingly being used to reduce administrative burden, surface insights faster, improve decision-making quality, and give managers greater confidence in fast-moving operational environments. Managers remain the “editor-in-chief”, while AI handles more of the underlying complexity.
“AI should be in service of human confidence,” Erik said.
A recurring theme across both keynote sessions and panel discussions was that AI maturity is ultimately an operational discipline challenge.
Erik Fjellborg noted that AI often exposes weaknesses already present inside organisations – unclear ownership, inconsistent processes, fragmented systems, and poor-quality data.
That same message was reinforced by Quinyx Chief Product Officer Laurence Painell.
Laurence outlined Quinyx’s longer-term vision for an agentic WFM platform, where specialised AI agents support forecasting, scheduling, compliance, analytics, absence management, and task orchestration through a central interface called Ava.
Rather than relying on disconnected workflows and manual intervention, the longer-term vision is for AI agents to proactively surface risks, recommend actions, and help managers navigate operational complexity in real time.
But alongside the vision for automation came repeated emphasis on governance, permissions, integrations, audit trails, and human oversight.
“You can go as fast or as slow as you want,” Laurence told attendees. “But we will ensure we have the controls in place and, most importantly, that there is a human in the loop checking decisions and driving the outcomes.”
Throughout the event, one message came through consistently: organisations cannot build confidence in AI-driven decisions without stronger operational foundations underneath them.
Another major theme at Navigate was how dramatically workforce management has evolved.
Historically, scheduling and time management were often treated as administrative or cost-control functions. Today, they are increasingly becoming operational intelligence and decision-support systems that influence productivity, employee engagement, customer experience, and profitability.
Discussions from IDC analyst Zachary Chertok highlighted how workforce data is increasingly shaping broader business decisions across operations, finance, and HR.
At the same time, workforce expectations are changing rapidly. Employees increasingly expect flexibility, autonomy, mobile-first experiences, and greater transparency around scheduling decisions. As AI becomes more embedded within workforce operations, organisations are also under growing pressure to ensure decisions feel fair, explainable, and trustworthy for frontline employees.
That creates a more complex balancing act for organisations as they try to improve efficiency while also building trust, fairness, engagement, and confidence among frontline teams.
Several customer panellists, including leaders from Kendra Scott, Starbucks, SATS, and Puuilo, discussed the challenge of balancing operational efficiency with employee trust in increasingly complex frontline environments. Many described moving away from spreadsheet-driven operations towards AI-enabled workforce management systems that improve forecasting accuracy, create more consistent scheduling practices, reduce administrative burden, and help managers make fairer, more transparent decisions.
Importantly, many also pointed to improvements in employee experience – from fairer scheduling to reduced bias and stronger transparency around decision-making. Several speakers also highlighted how better visibility and more consistent decision-making can help managers spend less time reacting to operational issues and more time supporting their teams.
The message throughout the day was clear: effective workforce management has become a strategic priority.
One of the day’s standout sessions came from Tobias Ahlin Bjerrome (formerly at GitHub, Mojang and Spotify), who cut through much of the noise surrounding AI.
Rather than framing AI as either revolutionary or overhyped, Tobias explored the reality of today's models being both extraordinary and unreliable. AI can outperform humans in highly quantifiable tasks, while sometimes struggling with simpler problems.
His argument was not that humans need to manually review every AI-generated output, but that organisations need to become better managers of the systems and processes surrounding AI. That means designing workflows where systems critique each other, assumptions are challenged, and outputs are refined through iteration rather than accepted at face value.
The organisations that succeed with AI will not be the ones handing over decision-making entirely, but the ones building smarter systems around how AI is used.
Navigate 2026 made one thing clear: workforce management is entering a new era shaped by AI-assisted decision-making, operational complexity, and rising expectations from both businesses and employees.
AI is accelerating the evolution of workforce management from an operational support function into a strategic decision-making platform. But the event also made clear that the future will not be defined by fully autonomous systems operating in isolation.
The organisations likely to gain the greatest advantage will be the ones that combine intelligent automation with human judgement, operational transparency, and employee trust – helping people make better decisions with greater confidence.
As Erik put it during his keynote: “Confidence itself is a competitive advantage.”
To explore the sessions from Navigate 2026 in more detail, you can register to watch the on-demand sessions from the event.