I don’t know what problem you were solving, but irony is that optimal constraint based scheduling is an NP hard problem, that is usually solved using heuristics that an AI could actually do a very good job at.
…so no, a few if and else statements will not cut it, in any sense compared to a competent manager.
…but plausibly yes, some kind of ML system could replace that part of the job.
(:
Problems are harder than they look; the whole point is that managers exist because those problems are hard, and they exist now because current approaches (a few if statements is obviously irrelevant, but specifically constraint solvers) to solving them a) take too long to run, b) are too difficult to express dynamically changing problems in and c) lack the “human touch” of favouritism that managers use to doll out rewards and punishments by giving good and bad shifts.
…but, quite plausibly, that work could now be done by a model that takes human speech input and translates it into input for a constraint solver, or even implements a novel constraint solver.
There is novel stuff now, that really does make a difference for this kind of specific domain problem.
It won’t get rid of a shop manager, but it’ll probably make their life easier and mean they can drop having an assistant manager.