XShift AI was created by 18-year-old Noah Marbach. | Photos courtesy of XShift AI
Noah Marbach has worked in a lot of restaurants, and they all shared a similar problem: Managers kept leaving. At one place near his hometown of Atlanta, Marbach worked for half a dozen different managers during the year he spent there, he said.
So, Marbach decided to come up with a solution. He identified shift scheduling as a particular pain point for managers. Then he developed an app that uses AI to help them create their schedules faster.
On its face, it’s a familiar story: An entrepreneurial-minded person sees a problem and tries to solve it with technology.
But dig a little deeper, and the tale of XShift AI is pretty extraordinary, both because of the person behind it, how he created it, and what that means for restaurant tech these days.
Let’s just get the big thing out of the way: Marbach is a senior in high school. While his peers are in class or playing sports, he spends much of his time thinking about software code and the finer points of restaurant scheduling.
“I’ve never met a single kid my age who’s doing what I’m doing,” the 18-year-old CEO said in an interview.
We were speaking on a Wednesday afternoon, a school day. But Marbach had been done with school for hours. He typically leaves after first period and heads over to his office at Atlanta Tech Village, a hub for startups in the city. (He took some classes over the summer, he said, and takes a couple other courses online, which allows him to knock off early.)
Noah Marbach
When ChatGPT came out in 2022, Marbach got really interested in artificial intelligence. He taught himself the basics of coding. He also began brainstorming a startup idea: an AI chatbot that helps restaurant managers make schedules.
The process involved pounding both the pavement and the keyboard. Marbach would walk into restaurants and ask managers if they thought an “AI copilot” would be helpful. He also bounced ideas off of ChatGPT. “Me and ChatGPT are like this,” he said, presumably crossing his fingers to demonstrate his bond with the chatbot (I couldn’t tell from over the phone).
Then last year, the AI company Anthropic launched Claude Code, a chatbot built for coding. A few months ago, with his business idea in place, Marbach gave Claude Code “a big master prompt” and began building what would become XShift, going back and forth with the chatbot to shape the product.
This is called “vibe coding,” a phenomenon that has quickly lowered the barrier of entry to software development. Y Combinator, the big Silicon Valley startup incubator, said last year that a quarter of its winter startup class was almost entirely vibe coded.
“It allows an 18-year-old high school kid like myself to build a better product, in my opinion, than 10 MIT developers, because of this new generation of technology,” Marbach said.
Not only was XShift built with AI, but the final product also closely resembles the AI chatbots of its day. It’s a chat interface where users can type a prompt like “Create a schedule for the main store for Feb. 1.” It then asks a couple followup questions and generates a schedule.
Marbach said it’s the only conversational AI scheduling product on the market. It takes into account employee preferences, overtime requirements and other compliance issues, and cuts the time it takes to make a schedule by 99%, he said. Though it is only a few months old, a handful of restaurants in the Atlanta area are using XShift, though Marbach declined to give names, noting that the relationships are still early.
That said, the company is generating revenue. Marbach is also letting some restaurants use it for free in exchange for their feedback. “I love feedback. I love iterating our product,” he said.
For instance, Marbach heard from several customers that they like to post their schedule on the wall, so he added an option to print it out. “That was something I never thought of,” he said. He’s also in the process of building a labor cost budget tool and a mobile version of XShift.
For now, Marbach is XShift’s only employee, one of the benefits of using AI to code. Some of his friends work as “unofficial contractors,” walking around and pitching XShift to restaurants. Marbach has also hired some freelance developers for certain projects.
XShift has no funding right now, but it does have some meetings coming up with potential investors. It is in no hurry. “What I’m looking to do is to get more customers, get more people, but to not scale too fast, because I’m still getting feedback,” Marbach said.
The rise of vibe coding may not necessarily be welcome news for restaurants. It seems likely to unleash a bumper crop of unproven tech upon a market that is already overcrowded.
XShift is undoubtedly a product of this new era. But its young founder is also surprisingly well-versed in some of the old-fashioned tenets of business building, like talking to customers, studying competitors and ensuring that there’s even a market for his product.
“I think a lot of people will be like, ‘Well, I just got this cool idea. I’m going to go build it,’” Marbach said. “They don’t think, ‘OK, well, will somebody pay for this idea? Is this idea already solved? How can I differentiate myself from competitors?’ And all that stuff that really goes into creating a business.”
Next year, Marbach plans to attend the University of Mississippi, where he will major in entrepreneurship.
