Fountain launches Cue to manage modern-day frontline workforce hiring and scheduling

Frontline workforce hiring and management platform Fountain today launched Cue, an artificial intelligence enterprise-ready management capability designed to assist with hiring and labor operations autonomously.

The new AI platform handles the internal work for hiring and scheduling, including screening, sourcing and picking time slots – all without manual intervention. The company said this helps management reduce time-to-hire while delivering consistent help across locations.

Founded in 2014, Fountain operates as a high-volume hiring platform for talent and hourly workforces. The company helps recruit on-demand staff for retail, restaurant, delivery and hospitality companies.

The company said Cue represents a “structural shift” in how human oversight controls workforce management, by helping build and update hiring workflows, sourcing candidates, detecting shift gaps and filling them, flagging underperforming locations and generating insights.

“Frontline workers are the majority of the global workforce, yet frontline operations remain the least automated and optimized,” Chief Product and Technology Officer Salim Jernite said. “Software digitized work, but agentic systems go further. They run it, introducing a new era of autonomous intelligence for enterprise operations.”

The company said it embedded multi-agent orchestration directly into its platform, rather than layering on an AI assistant. It runs every part of the management workflow from watching operations to reporting back to operations.

Frontline operations also exist in a constant state of flux, with managers saying roles are in constant need of filling. According to a report from talent acquisition company NXThing RPO 91% of hiring managers say hiring need is urgent and that more than 60% of new applicants abandon hiring because the process is byzantine, or too long and too complex.

Another recent report from Zentixb Analytics noted that the current employee scheduling and shift management planning software market sits at around $2.5 billion. Substantial growth is expected to bolster it to an estimated $4.5 to $6 billion by 2033, driven by AI and automation capabilities.

Fountain boasts a broad stable of customers across the services, hospitality and retail industry, including Uber Technologies Inc., Deliveroo, Taco Bell, Chick-fil-A, Lime and Safeway Inc.