Can it schedule across time zones?

Nothing about this is specific to AI. Calendar systems have been getting time zones wrong since before any of this existed.

The errors are quiet, which is what makes them expensive. Nobody discovers a booking was three hours out until somebody does not turn up.

Daylight saving is worse than zones. Two dates a year move the offset, and countries change on different weekends.

A caller says three o'clock and means their own time. You hear it as yours. Neither of you said which, so the assumption was never tested.

A calendar stores an appointment without a zone, then displays it in whatever zone the reader is in.

An integration passes a time as text rather than as a proper timestamp, and the receiving system applies its own default.

Daylight saving shifts one side and not the other, so a recurring appointment silently moves by an hour for part of the year.

The defense against all four is the same: say the zone when confirming, and keep one calendar as the authority.

Say you run a bookkeeping firm in Chicago and serve clients by video call across the country. A restaurant owner in Phoenix phones in July and asks for "two o'clock Thursday." He means his two o'clock.

Arizona doesn't observe daylight saving time, which makes it a good stress test. In July, Chicago is two hours ahead of Phoenix, so his 2pm is your 4pm. If the assistant books 2pm Central, you'll be sitting on a video call at 2pm while he's still at lunch service, and he'll join two hours later to an empty room.

A confirming line written for your business prevents that: "So that's Thursday at 2pm Arizona time, which is 4pm Central. Does that work?" He says yes, and both of you now hold the same fact.

There's a second trap. Once Chicago's clocks go back in November, the gap shrinks to one hour. A standing monthly call at 2pm Phoenix time moves from 4pm to 3pm on your calendar, and it'll collide with whatever you'd already put at 3.

Make one test booking as if you were the out-of-zone client. Then check it in three places. Your calendar should show it at the right hour in your zone. The invitation or confirmation the client receives should show their zone. And if a CRM or another tool gets a copy, open the record there, because a time passed along as plain text is where an hour most often goes missing.

Set two reminders a year. US clocks change on the second Sunday in March and the first Sunday in November. The Monday after each, look through the next two weeks of cross-zone appointments for anything that moved.

Plenty of businesses can ignore the whole subject. If every appointment happens at your premises or in your service area, all times are your local time and no caller expects otherwise. A plumber in Ohio doesn't need a zone in the confirmation, and adding one would only make people wonder why it's there.

Appointments are booked into your connected calendar rather than held separately, so there is one authority rather than two copies to disagree.

You write the confirming line, so making it state the zone is a wording decision you control.

The assistant reads the name, number and time back before it books, so a caller in another zone hears the slot said aloud and can correct it while they're still on the line.