The AI Scheduler builds and re-optimises efficient schedules by drawing on several layers of context about your technicians, properties, and tasks. This article walks through those inputs in further detail, how to generate a proposal, how to review and configure it, and how Reoptimisation and multi-day scheduling work.
Please note: The AI Scheduler free trial ends October 15th, after which a monthly fee per technician AI scheduled will be introduced to cover third party costs (live traffic API, business hour API, route optimisation API, compute and token costs.
The AI Scheduler is part of the New scheduler experience. To use it, turn on the New scheduler experience toggle at the top right corner of the scheduler. Learn more New scheduler experience.
AI Scheduler context
The quality of the schedules the AI Scheduler generates, depends on the amount of context within Uptick it’s able to draw upon to generate accurate, real life proposals. Scheduling context comes from 3 main sources:
Technicians
Each technician has a configurable profile within the scheduler, to view this simply click on any of your technicians names and their settings will appear. From here, you can adjust the following data against technicians:
Depot location
Depot location
Setting a depot location for a technician gives the AI Scheduler an anchor point.
It will prioritise jobs closer to the technician's depot when choosing from a large selection of tasks.
It can estimate travel time to and from the technician's first and last jobs of the day.
Work hours
Work hours
Work hours tell the AI Scheduler when a technician is available to work. You can set:
Standard work hours – uses your business's site-wide operating hours configuration.
Custom work hours – lets you set specific hours for an individual technician.
You can toggle days on or off depending on which days the technician works, and if their hours are the same each day, you can set them once and copy that day across all other active days. For example, 7:00 am–2:30 pm gives the AI Scheduler a seven-and-a-half-hour work window, five days a week.
Accreditations
Accreditations
Accreditations currently represent technician competencies, for example a plumbing licence or sprinkler fitter certification. Where accreditations are set up, the AI Scheduler uses them to determine which technicians are eligible for which tasks.
More context points are planned for technicians over time, covering far greater detail about the various types of skilled work they can test and/or repair.
Properties
Access Schedule
Access Schedule
Every task in Uptick has an associated access schedule, which tells the AI Scheduler when a property can be visited:
Access schedule | Meaning |
All hours | Property can be visited any day, any time. |
Business hours | Property can only be accessed Monday–Friday, 9:00 am–5:00 pm. |
Restricted hours | A custom access window you define — similar to setting technician work hours (e.g. Monday 3:00 am–9:00 am, Friday 3:00 am–9:00 am). |
Make Appointment / Pick Up Key / Needs Review | Falls back to the assigned technician's work hours window. |
The AI Scheduler will only schedule tasks at a property within its permitted access window.
Property location
Property location
The location of a task is one of the biggest data points that influences a tasks likelihood of being AI Scheduled. To ensure the AI Scheduler is able to use task location correctly, please ensure your property is geocoded (without being geo-coded this causes failures).
Tasks
Estimated durations
Estimated durations
The AI Scheduler needs to know how long each task is expected to take, without them - it will default a task to be scheduled for 1 hour. Estimated durations are manually set from three places:
At task creation – e.g. when creating a reactive task such as a callout, you have the option to set a duration.
Set against a routine and routine service level for a property – e.g. an annual Fire Hybrid inspection might be set to 1 hour 30 minutes, or a six-monthly Portable Wheeled Fire Extinguisher check to 30 minutes. Every task created for that property under that routine and service level inherits this duration.
Pulled from quotes for repair work – based on the labour estimation set on the quote.
Historic estimated durations
Historic estimated durations
The Historical labour estimate are Uptick's suggestion for how long a task is likely to take, based on how long technicians actually spent on previous visits doing the same kind of work at the same property. Uptick arrives at this figure by finding completed tasks at the same property that covered the same combination of routine servicing (only genuinely like-for-like visits count), measuring the actual time technicians logged working on the task for each of those visits, and taking the median across up to the 10 of the most recent matching visits, so one unusually long or short visit won't skew the suggestion.
When AI scheduling a selection of tasks, the AI Scheduler will use the historic labour estimate for any task that doesn't already have a manually set estimate, giving a more accurate estimate on your behalf. Users can override and update these estimates within the proposal at any time, for any selected task.
Accreditations
Accreditations
Tasks can have required accreditations, if the selected technician doesn’t have the required accreditations for that task, the AI Scheduler will exclude it from the proposal.
Selecting multiple tasks
The process of AI Scheduling is broken into three stages: selecting tasks, and scheduling them to a technician and reviewing the proposed schedule. This section walks through how each of those stages works.
Selecting tasks
When the New Scheduler Experience is toggled on, you have the ability to select multiple tasks. You can select tasks to be scheduled on
List view
Simply click the checkbox next to each task to select it. Once one task is selected, you can select other tasks by clicking anywhere on the task card.
Map view
The map view has three modes to let you view and select tasks geo-spatially:
Move mode (M) (default mode): click, pan, and scroll across the map, and view task details on hover.
Select mode (A): select tasks in bulk, either by clicking individual tasks or by clicking and dragging to select a group geo-spatially.
Deselect (D): works the same way as select more, click individually or drag to deselect tasks in bulk
Your selection persists across the map and list views and survives filter changes.
AI scheduler action buttons
When you select tasks, a task selector above the action buttons shows two totals side by side:
the number of tasks selected and their total estimated duration (for example, 12 tasks, 15h 35m), and
the number of tasks available within your current filters and their total estimated duration (for example, 50 tasks, 75h 31m).
From the action buttons you can:
Clear your entire selection.
Select all tasks within your current filtered view.
AI schedule the selected tasks using the AI schedule button
AI Scheduling tasks
To generate a proposal, simply drag and drop your selected tasks onto the desired technician's day, week or month. As you drag, the technician's day, week or month you're hovering over will highlight in green to show where the tasks will be scheduled.
Scheduling scope
It's important to remember that the scheduling scope (eg. start and end date) depends on the calendar view you're in:
Day view schedules a single day,
Week view schedules up to a week,
Month view schedules up to a month (only possible on Horizontal view currently)
When dropping tasks on the week or month view, the proposal will fill up the remaining working days from your drop point onwards. For example in the week view, dropping tasks on a Monday will fill up Monday to Friday, while dropping on a Wednesday will fill up Wednesday to Friday. The month view works the same way, but at a month scale — for example, dropping tasks on the 1st will fill up the whole month, while dropping on the 15th will fill up from the 15th to the end of the month.
Scheduling to multiple technicians
You can also schedule your selection of tasks to all visible technicians in the calendar at once, by dragging the tasks to the top left corner of the calendar. As you drag, all visible technicians will highlight in green to show that the tasks will be scheduled across each of them. As with single-technician scheduling, the scope in the week and month views can be adjusted by dropping across the available time scale for that view type.
Reviewing a proposed schedule
The proposed schedule panel
Once the AI Scheduler generates a proposal, you'll see a Proposed Schedule panel with the following information to review:
Assigned technician
The technician the schedule is proposed for, including their work hours and depot location (if set).
Utilisation
The utilisation summary showing overall utilisation, number of appointments included, and total distance covered
A breakdown of total performing time, total travel time, overall scheduled time, and remaining available time. If you have automated breaks configured - this will show here too.
Tasks
This shows an overview of the included and excluded tasks within your proposed schedule. You can also see more information about your selected tasks by clicking the view all tasks button.
Configurations
You can adjust the configurations within a proposed schedule within this section, see more about these configuration controls here
Schedule period (only visible on multi-day schedules)
When you create a multi-day schedule, you'll see a schedule period panel:
it will default to the overview, which shows utilisation information relating to the entire scheduled period, the map will show all included tasks across the entire period when on this selection.
You can also view individual days by selecting them within period selector, this will highlight the utilisation, calendar day and route map for that specific day.
Multi-technician schedules (only visible on multi-tech schedules)
Multi-technician schedules will display all assigned technicians at the top of the proposal:
It will default to highlight the overview of all proposed technicians (eg. the utilisation for all 3 techs)
You can select each proposed technician and the proposal will focus the utilisation, calendar and route map for that particular technician.
Editing a proposed schedule
When reviewing a proposed schedule, you have a number of options available to you to edit the proposal before you decide to accept it.
Working with the map view
Within the route map on the right hand side of the calendar, you have the option to show all excluded tasks. This lets you see where the excluded tasks sit in relation to your included schedule. You can also hover over each pin to see task information.
When excluded tasks are visible, you'll be able to see the exclusion reason as well.
Selected tasks overview
Within the tasks section of your proposed schedule, select the show all tasks button to see an overview of all selected tasks in your proposal.
You'll see all included and excluded tasks in this panel. You have the ability to search for specific tasks, either by task reference, task label, property and client name.
Reasons tasks might be excluded from scheduling
Reasons tasks might be excluded from scheduling
Reason | Description |
Task has no location set | The task doesn't have a geo-coded address |
Task/property has no timezone | The task or associated property doesn't have a timezone set |
Task is too far from any technician | The task is more than 400km away from the nearest technician |
No available time within property's access hours (hours exist but don't overlap the schedule window) | Task property is not accessible at the request time/s. |
No available time within property's access hours (no hours configured at all) | A task's property is missing an access schedule |
Grouped tasks at same property don't share a common time slot | When several tasks at the same property are meant to be visited together, but each has a different allowed time window, and no single time works for all of them, the visit can't be scheduled. |
No technician rostered to work that day (related to your technicians work hours) | The assigned technician/s aren't available to work that day or time |
Task session in progress hasn't finished | When a technician has already started working on a task but hasn't marked it complete yet, the scheduler can't book a new time for it until that in-progress work is finished. |
No technician has the required accreditation/skill | A technician (one or many) is missing all of the required accreditations |
Adding excluded tasks into the proposed schedule
To include any excluded task by simply dragging it onto the proposed schedule. You can add tasks at the start, end and in between appointments on both vertical and horizontal views.
Once it's been included, it will then appear as included on both the map and the schedule with a tick symbol instead of an X symbol.
Including tasks won't adhere to any technician work hours or property access schedules, so you have total control where you want forcibly add them back into the schedule.
Re-ordering proposed appointments
Manually adjust appointment order (vertical week view only)
You can drag and drop tasks above and below each other to manually adjust the route of any proposal in the week view. You can also drag tasks between days to adjust the route of tasks between days. This functionality is only available on the week view currently.
Reverse day
You can also reverse the the entire order of a proposed day, using the Reverse day button.
Adjusting task durations
In the tasks section of the proposal, you can edit each tasks estimated duration. Once an edit to a tasks duration has been made, you need to update the proposal using the recalculate button.
Please note: Editing a task durations within a proposal will update that task's estimated duration as well, the change will persist outside the proposed schedule.
Reverting changes
You can revert individual changes as you go with the undo & redo buttons, available next to the reverse order button. You can also select the reset button at the bottom of the proposal panel, which will revert all changes made (including configuration and manual adjustments).
Finalising a proposed schedule
You have 2 options once you're ready to finalise a proposed schedule.
Accept: Once accepted, the proposed appointments are created on the technician's day/scheduled period. And will be visible for them in the mobile app.
Cancel: This reverts the proposed technician's schedule to what it was before (eg. a blank day or back to whatever appointments were already scheduled).
AI Scheduler configurations
You can configure your AI scheduler configurations in two places
Scheduler wide configurations: which will be applied by default, every time you generate proposed schedules, learn more in the New scheduler experience article, or
Proposed schedule configurations: which let you override default settings within an individual proposal.
Please note: Changing any of these settings in a proposed schedule doesn't update it automatically, you'll need to click Re-calculate for the proposal to reflect your changes.
Reoptimise an existing scheduled day
The AI Scheduler can also be used to Reoptimise appointments already scheduled on a technician's day.
Select the events within a technician's day that you would like to re-optimise. Each calendar view has a daily total scheduled time and checkbox option to select all events within a day.
Once events are selected, you can:
Clear the selection
Cancel the selected appointments in bulk. This removes any appointments and reverts their associated tasks back to ready status.
Reschedule them by dragging onto another day or another technician. You can also move the calendar date and your selected events will remain visible on the bulk actions menu. Allowing you to reschedule events in the future.
Re-optimise the selection.
Clicking Re-optimise tells the AI Scheduler to rebuild the most efficient order for the selected appointments. The resulting proposal looks the same as a standard proposed schedule, but also flags any appointments that couldn't be fitted back in, these appear as removed in the tasks breakdown and overview section.
Protecting appointments from being removed or adjusted during re-optimisation
If you don't want certain appointments to be moved or removed during re-optimisation, you have a few options to either bring them back or safeguard them:
Use appointment categories to safeguard them. Appointment categories let you bucket appointments (e.g. "booked but flexible," "tentative," "booked, don't move"). Any category with the inflexible toggle turned on will prevent that appointment from being adjusted or removed during re-optimisation. You can turn the inflexible toggle on for any appointment category within your sitewide configuration section, under the appointments section
If your appointments have been removed, you can drag them back into the proposed schedule manually, via the tasks section of the proposal
Re-optimising with inflexible appointments in place will safeguard those appointments while still shifting other, flexible appointments into more efficient time slots. Re-optimisation also factors in real-time travel between each appointment's actual location at the time of the schedule. Eg. a proposed travel estimate at 8:30am will factor travel time at that time of the day, rather than at the time of the proposed schedule.
Editing and configurations
You have the same editing and configuration options available to you when re-optimising, as you do when AI scheduling tasks. Outlined in the section above.
FAQs
Can technicians run the AI Scheduler from the mobile app?
No, the AI Scheduler is only available to the desk users.
What data does the AI Scheduler use when building a schedule?
The AI Scheduler considers:
Task location
Technician working hours
Access schedules (open, business hours, or restricted)
Required accreditations
Technician depot (start/end location)
Break configuration
Estimated task times
Can the AI Scheduler automatically fill in the "typically takes" estimated duration on tasks?
Yes. If Auto-estimate task durations is enabled in Scheduler configuration, the Scheduler will automatically populate the estimated duration on tasks that don't already have one set - it only fills in the blank.
Does the AI Scheduler use scheduled time or actual time on site when auto-estimating task durations? It uses actual time spent on site, based on previous routine-based visits at that property, applying the median average of those visits. This currently applies to I&T tasks only.
The "typically takes" estimate for regional jobs seems to include travel time. Can it be adjusted to exclude that?
A manual adjustment workflow isn't available. However, we plan to make auto-estimates more configurable in the future.
Can the AI Scheduler account for working back toward the depot during the day? Yes, with some setup. Mark any fixed early job as inflexible and enable return to depot in the scheduler configuration. The Scheduler will then preference moving towards the depot as the day progresses.
Does the AI Scheduler respect restricted access hours and days set on a property?
It is designed to consider property access schedules when auto-scheduling and re-optimising. If you notice restrictions being ignored, please check that the access schedule is set on the property. Any confirmed issues should be reported so the team can investigate.
Can the AI Scheduler group work by zone or region across a week?
This is not currently available but if you are interested in seeing this feature, please provide your feedback on how it will assist your work by contacting Support.
Will the Scheduler split one day's selected work over multiple days if there is too much driving?
Not currently. The Scheduler will not intentionally split one day's selected work into multiple days at this stage. If you want to split longer tasks over multiple days, you can do this can using the new Splitting an appointment function.
Why are some tasks excluded from a proposal? Tasks may be excluded for a number of reasons, including:
Being more than 400km from the nearest technician (You have the option to 'ignore depot location' and recalculate within a proposal if this happens)
Missing geolocation or timezone
Not being accessible within the relevant time window
Not fitting into the schedule (eg. not enough time to fit into the proposed day)
Missing required accreditations
Can I manually add an excluded task to the schedule anyway?
Yes. You can drag an excluded task directly onto the proposed schedule to include it manually. Click the 'show all tasks' button within the tasks section of the proposal panel, from there you can drag any excluded task onto the schedule.
Does the AI Scheduler support toolbox meetings or other fixed non-job calendar events?
Yes, the AI Scheduler will respect any existing scheduled events (appointments and task sessions) and schedule around them. Please provide your feedback if you find the AI scheduler doesn't respect existing scheduled events by contacting Support.
If I edit the schedule after the AI creates it, will travel time be recalculated?
No, the AI schedule will not automatically be recalculated. But please provide your feedback on how it will assist your work by contacting Support.
Can the AI Scheduler assign a large multi-day job across multiple technicians?
Not yet. The AI Scheduler can assign and schedule many tasks to a single technician across a day/week, or distribute those tasks across multiple technicians over a day/week. It cannot yet assign a single task to multiple technicians, this capability is on the roadmap.
Is there reporting available for travel time versus billable time?
Not yet, but this is on the roadmap.