Answer admissions enquiries while the student is still deciding

Only if it is grounded. We build the agent to answer from your own course pages, prospectus and policy documents, retrieved at the moment of the question, and to cite what it used. Where a rule is conditional, on qualifications, funding or visa status, the agent gathers the facts and hands the judgement to an advisor rather than guessing.

Usually, and this is where a large part of the engineering goes. We have integrated with hosted and on premise systems through APIs, database views, SFTP file drops and, where nothing else exists, a scheduled sync. We start read only so nothing can be written incorrectly, then add write actions once the flows are proven.

That is the case we design for. Voice and chat capacity scales horizontally, so a peak day is answered the same way a quiet one is, without a callback backlog building up. Advisors stop taking first line questions and spend the day on the conversations that need judgement. Everything is transcribed, so you can see what was asked and where the pressure was.

Yes, because the work splits. Phase one is the grounded agent answering from your published course pages and prospectus, read only, with no writes to the student record, so it can go live before the integration is finished. Phase two adds application status lookup, then write back. For phase one you need a named owner for course content, an escalation rota for handovers, and a decision on what the agent must never answer.