AI assistant for student enrollment and student services

Sharjah Maritime Academy unveiled Majid on 15 July 2026, a voice and chat assistant for prospective students and parents. It explains programmes and admission requirements, links to the online application portal, answers admission and registration questions at any hour and connects users to an admissions advisor when personal support is needed. A chat window was live on the academy website in November 2026. The academy has published no usage or outcome figures.

From March 2026 the University of Northampton piloted Kaltura's conversational avatar platform with staff and students. The first avatar, NORA, was set up to give information about the University and point users to the right services, followed by a second avatar and one modeled on a staff member. Testers valued fast, multilingual answers for simple information questions, asked for real time captions, and worried about replacing human contact. Avatars that copied a known person raised expectations the tool could not meet. The University's report lists FAQ answers, out of hours signposting and multilingual access as the best fit.

The University of Central Florida runs Knightbot, a Mainstay powered assistant that matches student questions on academics, financial aid and campus resources to a curated, staff approved knowledge base and answers by text message and on university websites. The university says it chose this design over generative AI. Since January 2023 its knowledge base has grown from six units to more than 50 and it has fielded more than 459,000 incoming messages from 277,000 unique users. The university reports that 85% of student queries are resolved without human intervention and that about 12,000 staff hours were freed.

The University of Hawaii system runs proactive text message chatbots, one per campus, from EdSights across all 10 campuses as part of a common standard of care for student success. Between August and December 2025 students sent 72,089 texts. The chatbots answer questions, connect students to university resources and flag students to staff for follow up, including students who report feeling nervous or overwhelmed. The university reports 4,294 questions answered without human intervention and about 357 staff hours saved in that period.

Georgia State University combined a new student portal, which guides incoming students through the steps needed before the first day of classes (such as financial aid documents, immunization records, placement exams and class registration), with "Pounce", an AI enhanced chatbot that answers their questions around the clock by text message. The assistant vice president of undergraduate admissions said every interaction was tailored to the specific student's enrollment task.

In its first summer (2016) Pounce delivered more than 200,000 answers and the university, with the portal and the chatbot together, reduced summer melt by 22 percent, an additional 324 students in class on the first day. Separately, in a randomized control trial the university saw a four percent overall decrease in the share of confirmed freshmen who did not enroll, and it says those gains came from the students who had access to Pounce.

The same executive said the university would otherwise have needed 10 more full time staff to handle the volume of messaging.

The University of Maryland Eastern Shore's admissions and enrollment team, led by Dr. Reginald Garcon and Darryl Isom, faced more than 500 unresolved registration holds each term, often for small fixable issues such as missing vaccination records, and could not reach every student one on one. Working with Mainstay, the university used AI enhanced, research backed text message conversations to proactively reach every student with a hold, give clear next steps, and escalate complex cases to staff.

The case study reports that the 500 unresolved holds dropped to just 27, freeing staff to focus on high need students, and describes four consecutive years of enrollment growth at the university. UMES is now extending the same AI enhanced outreach to nontraditional and online students.

The Eller College of Management at the University of Arizona launched a multilingual Ivy and Ocelot chatbot from Gravyty in December 2023 across its graduate program pages, to answer prospective students' questions about admissions, deadlines and tuition. Chatbot data showed that inconsistent tuition displays caused repeat questions, and the college standardized them. Gravyty reports 2,917 chatbot interactions with 76% of frequently asked questions resolved.

The University of Cape Town upgraded EduBot, its student support chatbot, from a rule based menu system to a generative AI assistant on 28 May 2025. The assistant is trained on university documents and web content and supports more than 100 languages, with handover to human agents. In the first 90 days it served 43,600 unique users, mostly prospective undergraduates. The story, published by Verge AI, the AI division of SIS Global, in its vendor channel on ITWeb, reports that 93% of users had their questions answered without human intervention and a 97% satisfaction score from 3,823 ratings.

Adelphi University launched Adele, a conversational AI assistant on the Mainstay platform, on its website in January 2022 and extended it to two way text messaging for about 6,000 current students in March 2023. Adele sends reminders about academic and financial deadlines, answers questions from a shared knowledge base, enabled generative AI in July 2025 and requests a human from the right office by email when needed.

A cross office task force coordinates campaigns, and the university adopted a policy for text messaging in June 2024. The vendor reports 81,167 messages handled by the bot in the past year. Assuming approximately one minute per message, the vendor estimates this at 1,353 staff capacity hours; that is a modeled figure, not a measured saving, so it is not recorded as a metric.

SUNY Empire State University, a State University of New York institution that serves mainly adult learners across New York, launched the virtual assistant "Blue" on the Ocelot platform in 2021 as the self service arm of its 1Stop Student Services team. Blue answers prospective and current students around the clock in English, Spanish and simplified Chinese about financial aid, records and registration, student accounts, admissions and deadlines.

It gives a personalized answer after the student logs in, and when it has no answer it offers a short form that is routed to the 1Stop team. The call center pointed callers on hold to Blue during the launch year. The university says that generative AI through Ocelot has improved the answers and led to fewer escalations.

Ocelot reports that Blue handled more than 17,000 conversations in 2021 and that call volume in the Fall 2021 peak period dropped 28 percent.

Austin Peay State University introduced a Mainstay text message chatbot, "The Gov", in 2017 to send incoming students orientation information and nudges, and later interactive surveys. Its first intent to enroll campaign in 2019 received a 40% response rate within a day, which Mainstay's case study says would have taken more than a month by paper survey, and showed staff which students still planned to attend. According to the case study (about 2020), the chatbot was also used for housing, advising and event updates.

The University of West Florida launched its chatbot, Argie, in the fall of 2017, becoming the first school in Florida to use an AI chatbot for recruitment. With the first cohort of incoming freshmen, Mainstay's case study reports a 2 percent increase in completed applications and a 3 percent increase in conversion from confirmed to enrolled.

UWF then introduced Argie to transfer students mid cycle for fall 2019, with a 3.5 percent increase in completed transfer applications and a 1.8 percent increase in transfer enrollment, and gave it a full recruitment cycle for spring 2020, when the university reported a 33.3 percent increase in completed applications and a 35 percent increase in enrollment confirmations among transfer students.

Argie sent proactive nudges and non transactional messages, including a campaign to students with missing application items, to help students feel a sense of belonging before arriving on campus. Following these results UWF began extending Argie to retention as well.