How 19-year-old Noah Marbach created an AI platform to streamline employee scheduling

Building an AI platform might not be every high school student’s extracurricular activity, but it was just the right move for 19-year-old Noah Marbach. After being sidelined with a sports injury, he launched employee scheduling and workforce management platform XShift AI during his senior year of high school last November.

The idea for the platform came from his experience working as a lifeguard and in restaurants where he saw pain points in employee scheduling and management.

Revenue Brew sat down with Marbach to talk about building XShift AI and his goal of becoming one of the world’s youngest billionaires.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

How did you come up with the idea for XShift AI?

I saw firsthand how brutal employee scheduling is for managers, and not just employee scheduling, but building schedules, handling the callouts, enforcing budgets, communicating with team members—it’s all still manual. I know there’s obviously competition on the market when we started. There’s multiple billion-dollar companies competing in the shift-based industry, but they all still force managers to build the schedules manually. They all still force managers to validate all these constraints manually. A good example is when you’re building a schedule—typically it varies based on the industry—but you’re validating all sorts of constraints when you’re building a schedule: employees’ availability, reliability, preferences, budgets, overtime, PTO, and various other custom policies. You’re validating all these constraints, and that’s very time-consuming for companies.

Can you tell us more about the product?

When you’re building a schedule on one of these other tools…you’re still building the schedule yourself. You’re still evaluating employees’ availability. Meaning, when I’m building a schedule, I have to constantly click around to see Johnny’s not available Monday through Friday from 9am to 2pm because he has school. Ava can’t do Tuesdays, Thursdays 7 to 9pm because she has soccer practice.

There’s also budgets. A lot of times, you can’t go over budget. Labor cost is huge in these industries, so these other companies that are in scheduling, you have to set labor budgets and they have to be enforced…Companies have to track their labor budget and they have to track how much each employee is getting paid, and add up overtime and all that when that comes…What we did is we asked the question: Why should companies even have to build the schedules at all?

How has the company grown since you launched?

OpenAI ads have been huge, so we’ve recently been on OpenAI using their ad platform and getting significant return on investment from that. Also, SEO and GEO, so even optimizing for a lot of queries. For example, recently one of our biggest blogs is if you look at how to reduce restaurant overtime, we rank number three or four. From that, we typically get sign-ups a lot of times every day. It talks about the problem of overtime in restaurants. It talks about how XShift AI solves it, and that’s been really able to get us a lot of leads…In the beginning, we were relying primarily on connections and walk-ins. Now we’re starting to shift toward more scalable channels, like paid ads, SEO and GEO, and word-of-mouth marketing, and those three are probably our biggest channels right now.

What are your goals for XShift AI?

I want to build a multibillion-dollar company and become one of the world’s youngest billionaires. That’s my goal.