A recent Gartner report on trends impacting higher education reveals an almost doubling of institutions investing in AI chatbots over the past year.
In 2020, the Gartner CIO survey found 16% of respondents reporting that they had invested in AI chatbots. In 2021, 30% reported the same.
Gartner notes that “Chatbots have reached an adoption inflection point in higher education where it soon will be one of many expected ‘multiexperience’ interaction channels for students, faculty and staff. Already, chatbots are becoming a ‘cost of entry’ for baseline student experience.”
Gartner sees the business case for higher education through two immediate benefits:
In February 2022, the Chronicle of Higher Education surveyed 519 higher education senior administrators. The survey found that digital transformation is gaining greater urgency among colleges and universities. Notable findings:
The portion of administrators who said these options were “very important” goals for digital transformation:
| Two-Year Colleges | Four-Year Colleges | |
| Increase Enrollment | 70% | 59% |
| Improve Student Services | 84% | 67% |
| Improve the Educational Experience Online | 84% | 67% |
| Improve the Educational Experience in the Classroom | 84% | 67% |
| Increase Operational Efficiency | 80% | 69% |
The two reports – one from Gartner and the other from the Chronicle – reveal an accelerated pace of digital transformation, with technologies such as chatbots being a focus. Both four-year and two-year institutions see the urgent need for change. Two-year institutions are signaling that they have a greater urgency compared to the four-year institutions. Nonetheless, both segments – with large majorities of responses – are indicating that digital transformation is important for enrollment, the student educational experience, and student support. There are also valuable operational efficiencies that come with digital transformation.
Improving the student experience requires a strategic approach that helps institutions to meet individual student needs by augmenting and scaling human efforts.
Higher education is yet to realize the full potential of artificial intelligence. Innovators see AI as an opportunity to improve administrative efficiency and impact student experience…
As enrollment and student outcomes remain under the microscope in the media, politics, and within our institutions, college and university leaders face immense pressure to scrutinize their own data to identify and address barriers to student success.
Address the one common factor we see that sabotages institutions’
As we plan to leverage human-centered AI in many areas of higher education, thinking about how we can apply it to meet our students’ expectations of hyper-personalization is a no-brainer.
How to learn from engagement data, and take action on it.
