This week the World Cup kicks off.

This week the World Cup kicks off. Over the next 39 days, 48 teams will play 104 matches across 16 cities in the US, Canada, and Mexico. Host cities were told to expect the tourism event of a generation, and a lot of restaurants and hotels spent months and a lot of money getting ready for the surge.

A couple days out, the picture looks very different. Close to 80% of hotel operators across the US host cities say bookings are tracking below their initial forecasts. In Kansas City it's 85% to 90%, running below even a normal summer. In Miami, the strongest market, nearly half of hotels still expect a miss. Ticket prices tell the same volatile story; FIFA went to dynamic pricing for the first time, with seats starting as low as $60 and climbing into the thousands, and the cost of going to a match swings wildly by city. A few markets think they'll get slammed but others figure it might be a normal summer.

This has made me think back to when Taylor Swift was in New Orleans for three nights. That was demand everyone saw coming – yet it still broke things. The city filled up and restaurants were busier than they were for the Super Bowl. They struggled to keep up. The unfortunate part? The labor to handle it already existed. Workers who could cover all the shifts were already there, they were just working a few blocks away at places that weren't seeing any of the surge.

The World Cup looks like it may present the opposite kind of problem: demand nobody can size up yet, and which may land completely differently from one host city to the next.

Put yourself in the shoes of a restaurant manager near one of these stadiums right now. Do you staff up for the surge you were promised, train people, build out the schedule, and risk a reality check when it turns out to be a normal July? Or do you staff normal and risk getting buried if it does hit? Either way you're guessing, and guessing wrong in either direction costs you.

This is exactly the gap we work on at Ando. Most scheduling assumes you can name your demand in advance and build a fixed plan around it. But so many of us know that operations don't work that way, and a moment like this makes it obvious. What actually would help is a system that can flex, staff you up when the crowds show, and pull back when they don't – without a manager rebuilding the whole week by hand every time the picture changes.

When demand is certain, good intelligence makes staffing easier. When demand is uncertain, it's the only thing that makes staffing possible at all.