An admissions copilot that handles the first hour.
Voice and chat in one channel, three languages, trained only on the institution's own admission policies, and built to hand off to a human counsellor the moment the stakes rise.
A stylised recreation of the product. Names, figures and documents are illustrative.
The same fifteen questions, answered all day.
Counsellors spent most of their time on the same fifteen questions. Eligibility, fees, hostel availability, curriculum, visa paperwork. Important questions, answered the same way every time, in three languages, eleven hours a day. The people who should have been having the harder conversations were doing first-hour intake at scale.
Leadership wanted the easy questions handled by a system, with a clean handoff to a human the moment judgment was needed. They did not want a chatbot. They wanted a copilot that could speak, listen, take notes, hand off, and never invent an answer.
Sixteen weeks. Built on refusal, not confidence.
The principle from day one: the agent's first job is to know what it does not know. Every conversation, every evaluation and every training session followed from it. The hardest engineering was in the refusals.
Policy ingestion
We spent a week with the head of admissions and catalogued every brochure, FAQ, policy memo and email template from the previous two cycles. The agent can answer only from that corpus. Anything outside it is an automatic handoff. General world knowledge was left out on purpose.
Weeks 1 to 4Conversation design
Conversations in English, Hindi and one regional language. Voice and chat in the same flow, switchable mid-conversation. Every exchange logged, every handoff annotated, every refusal explained. Counsellors were trained on what the agent would and would not do, and signed off on each flow before launch.
Weeks 4 to 8Build and evaluate
We built the agent, the voice layer, the handoff and the audit log, then evaluated against three hundred real questions from previous cycles. We refused to ship until the refusal-on-uncertainty rate passed ninety-two percent. Better that the agent fetches a counsellor than guesses.
Weeks 8 to 14Live, then iterate
Released two weeks before the admissions cycle opened. The first cycle handled eighteen thousand applicants in thirty days, and senior counsellors spent their time where they add value. The second cycle is in flight, with refinements drawn from real handoffs.
Weeks 14 to 16Counsellors back to doing counselling.
Applicants get faster answers, in their own language, at any hour. Every conversation is auditable, every handoff is clean, every refusal is logged. The institution now has a complete record of how its admissions process behaves at the front line, which it never had before.
The counsellors stopped answering the same fifteen questions. Now they answer the ones that matter.Head of admissions · Higher education institution · India