Appreciate the kind words. You’re right that the big SIS and ERP vendors are building their own AI features, but at the end of the day institutions own their data and expect interoperability across systems. Workday, PeopleSoft, and similar systems all provide APIs or integration layers that schools already use for reporting and warehousing.
Where those systems are more closed, we work with the institution to find creative but still sanctioned paths such as through their integration hub or data warehouse. That way we are not asking the vendor for special access, just making better use of the plumbing that is already there.
I love that comic, and thank you for bringing it up because we are trying to avoid exactly that. We don't intend to be a system of record, we fully recognize that higher education has deep integrations with systems of record that contain complex business rules.
We intend to be an interoperable layer that sits on top of these systems, and allows users to not only surface valuable insights but also take actions within those systems in a secure and compliant way. You can think of it less as reporting and more as a “system of work” that leverages LLMs and agents to streamline the messy, cross-system tasks that slow people down today.
That was one of our assumptions too, since you often hear about long cycles and low willingness to pay. Once we started gathering feedback and learning about the pain points, we found a strong appetite for technology that makes jobs easier and more effective.
Staff and administrators are also just people working in critical functions. When the tools help with their day-to-day job functions, the willingness to adopt is there. We’ve stayed focused on education because the problems are tied directly to retention and student success, and those are outcomes schools care deeply about.
That is great feedback, and agreed that LLMs definitely have generic outputs, especially if missing the right context. To combat this, we're actively working on playing with which data we can pull, how to cleanly give it to an LLM and which models to use to improve the inference (while staying within the compliance boundaries).
We've found the "chat" functionality to be especially useful for advisors since we've been able to surface insights to them without them having to log onto many different systems and just present it in a clean output, as you pointed out.
Would love to chat! We are always looking to gain insight on how we can improve our product with existing data, and this sounds like a great input. Feel free to reach us at [email protected]
Thank you, appreciate the support! Our goal is to ultimately get this in the hands of staff AND students, who expect to be using good technology with intuitive user experiences so that student outcomes improve not only in the classroom but across the full student experience.
Completely agreed, that is one of the biggest challenges in this industry! And it's surprising how many software systems are being used by higher education that aren't designed or built for them.
Where those systems are more closed, we work with the institution to find creative but still sanctioned paths such as through their integration hub or data warehouse. That way we are not asking the vendor for special access, just making better use of the plumbing that is already there.