Christina Tan, chief of staff to the CEO at CollegeVine, a company offering AI agents for higher education institutions, said AI agents are similar to generative AI chatbots and require similar considerations from users, but they can operate even more independently.
“AI agents are proactive in nature, hence the ‘agent,’” Tan said. “They actually make decisions on the actions that they’ll take based on the information that they have. This is different from something like a ChatGPT, where a user needs to go and prompt to get an answer.”
AUTONOMOUS AND JUDGMENT-FREE
AI agents function more closely to staff members, Tan said, so they can be useful for covering rote tasks within the administrative side of education. CollegeVine, for example, offers a customizable AI recruiter that makes calls to consenting prospective students on a college’s behalf.
However, while the task is more human-like, Knox College's Dean of Admissions Nathan Ament said the fear of taking jobs away from humans didn’t arise much for his team when they partnered with CollegeVine, because the AI agent cold-calling students was doing a job they had stopped doing 10 years ago. They also taught their agent to pull Internet resources about Knox College into CollegeVine's database so it could represent the institution in conversations.
When users at Knox or Berry are training an AI agent, staff have conversations with it in order to establish tone and formality and find points where it’s wrong or stumped. They also train the agents to redirect conversations about financial aid, the likelihood of acceptance or other sensitive topics back to humans.
Ament said Knox College has made 128 outbound calls and received 88 calls in the last month and a half or so, including 20 over the winter break, which staff would have missed because the office was closed. The agent is not permitted to contact students without their permission in previous email contact, so this suggests students aren’t averse to interacting with AI agents.
Andrew Bressette, vice president for enrollment management at Berry College, said he has seen an openness among students that have engaged with their agent, Missy, sometimes even more than with a human counselor.
“Students who are beginning their search, and they’re trying to evaluate schools, have a number of boxes that they need to check before they really start to dig deeply,” he said. “Students who are at that high level of exploration get freaked out or creeped out when a counselor calls them.”
Tan added that students might also worry that a counselor would make note of their comments, questions or uncertainty, and count it against them in the application process, whereas the AI agent is more judgment-free.
ANY TIME, ANY PLACE
Students who need help with a class might feel more inclined to ask a chatbot for help for the same reason, or due to physical barriers like time of day or where they are. This is one advantage of chatbots of any kind, and AI agents can build on this, according to Danny Liu, a professor at the University of Sydney and co-developer of Cogniti, a platform that allows educators to create custom chatbots.
Liu calls these chatbots “stunt doubles,” because they are trained on materials selected by the instructor and meant to mimic the kind of support the instructor would provide. An instructor could use agents to interact with students before they come to class to help them ask better questions during a lecture, he said, or interact with them at 11 p.m., right before they’re turning in an assignment, to answer questions and give last-minute feedback.
“It’s physically impossible for an educator to do that, but it's actually now very possible for an educator to build an AI stunt double agent who can do that on their behalf,” Liu said.
Custom GPTs are on the rise in education. Google’s version, Gemini Gems, includes a premade version called Learning Coach, and Microsoft announced last week a new agent addition to Copilot featuring use cases at educational institutions.
Liu said Cogniti is being used by 2,000 instructors at more than 60 institutions worldwide, and Tan said CollegeVine has over 100 partner institutions. This year, Tan said, CollegeVine will expand beyond the recruiter for prospective students to launch an AI adviser for current students and an ambassador for alumni.
On the educator side, AI agents can be useful across the many roles that educators play, Liu said. The possibilities for AI agents are vast, but they can never replace the way a teacher is able to roll all that into one.
“As an educator, you are a cheerleader, you're a shoulder to cry on, you’re a teacher, you’re an instructor, you’re an administrator,” he said. “You’re all these kinds of things, and the different tasks that you have in each of these roles varies, and the limitation of the current AIs right now is that if you tell it to just be you, it won't know how to do it, because you have so much in what you do.”
