01
Date and requirement accuracy
Against a set validated by the admissions office: whether every date and requirement matches the in-force document.
Why it matters here
It is the headline metric. A wrong date costs an applicant a whole term.
AI for education
In an educational institution the expensive error is not a slow answer: it is an invented date. An applicant who misses an enrolment deadline because the assistant got it wrong does not come back. We build on the real calendar and regulations, with explicit refusal.
4–6 weeks to production · 3 years sustaining document retrieval in production · 48 hours to a proposal with fixed scope and price
- Admissions
- Requirements
- Academic calendar
- Regulations
- 24/7 support
- Explicit refusal
- LMS
Built on
An engineering team that has already been on the other side.
Ninety seconds: who we are, how we work and what you get at the end.
From your company’s documents to a system that answers and acts
Contracts, price lists, email, the CRM: what you already have becomes sourced answers and agents that do the work. Pick a case and follow the path.
Example: a student asks how late they can drop a course. The system answers and files the request.
01Your documents
Academic_rules.pdf72 pp
Platform · enrolments9,800
Programmes_202638 PDF
Student_email11,000
Policy_wording_2026.pdf84 pp
Motor_exclusions.pdf12 pp
Claims_email1,240
ERP · policies38,400
Price_list_2026.xlsx118 rows
CRM · opportunities2,310
Proposals_202556 PDF
Sales_email4,800
Connected by API or uploaded. Nothing leaves your infrastructure when the case demands it.
02Preparation
Normalise
Chunk
Tagprogramme = data_engineering
Make searchable
72 pp → 510 chunks
03Search
94 of 100finds the right chunk
142 mstakes
Searches by meaning and by exact word, and filters by the tag before choosing.
04Sourced answer
Until when can I drop a course without it affecting my average?
Until week 8 of the semester. Source: Academic rules, article 31.
answers with source · 91 of 100
05Agent that acts
- Queried · enrolment 55102
- Read · article 31
- Decided · eligible
- Asked for approval · registrar
- Executed · filed the request
- Queried · policy 88213
- Read · clause 4.3
- Decided · open a claim
- Asked for approval · human
- Executed · created the case in the ERP
- Queried · CRM
- Queried · price list
- Drafted · proposal
- Asked for approval · manager
- Executed · sent and logged
Swipe to follow the flow →
The five gaps in an educational institution
01
The applicant who drops out over a late reply
Deciding where to study has a short window, and whoever answers first enters the conversation.
02
Admissions answering the same thing a thousand times
Requirements, costs, dates, credit transfers, scholarships. Expensive people doing repeated work.
03
Manual enrolment and documents
Error-prone manual processes at exactly the highest-volume moment of the year.
04
No support outside office hours
Much of the evening and online student body asks questions when the office is closed.
05
Uneven communication through the term
Students find out late what applies to them, and that feeds dropout.
01
The technical part
A date is not an opinion
Almost everything an educational institution publishes is dated and versioned: the calendar changes every term, admission requirements change by cohort, regulations get amended. A system that indexes it all together answers with whichever version sat closest in vector space, and in this domain that answer costs an applicant.
The fix is the same one we apply in insurance and has the same shape: effective dates as mandatory metadata at ingestion, filtering by period before ranking, and the document’s date visible in the answer. With two calendars loaded, the system does not pick the most similar one: it picks the one in force, or says there is ambiguity and escalates.
The second rule is refusal. When the question is about an exception — an unusual credit transfer, a disciplinary case, a particular situation — the correct answer is to route it, not to approximate from the general regulation. That gets measured: the evaluation set includes cases whose only correct answer is an escalation.
How it is measured
The numbers before opening it to applicants
02
Currency of the cited document
That the answer comes from the calendar or regulation of the right period, with its date visible.
Why it matters here
With two versions loaded, a system without a currency filter answers with last year’s and sounds just as confident.
03
Escalation on exceptions
Questions about transfers, disciplinary matters or particular cases whose only correct answer is routing.
Why it matters here
General regulations do not settle an exception, and answering from them creates an expectation the institution has to walk back.
04
Groundedness
Every statement holds up against the cited document, adding nothing.
Why it matters here
It is what lets the admissions office defend an answer when a parent pushes back.
What we do not build here
We do not build systems that grade work, assess students or make admission decisions. An academic decision has a named person behind it, and a system that automates it moves that responsibility to a vendor.
We also do not recommend starting if the documentation is out of date or scattered across offices with no clear owner. A retrieval system over an old calendar hands out old dates with far more authority than a posted PDF, and that is worse than not having it.
Related services
AI chatbots and assistants
Chatbots for businesses of every size
With the evaluation set run before it ever reaches production.
RAG systems
RAG that answers well — and knows when to stay quiet
Chunking, reranking and hybrid search, evaluated with recall@k and NDCG.
Integrations and APIs
Connecting the systems that do not talk today
MCP servers against the systems already in operation.
AI automation
If someone does it by copying and pasting, it can be automated
Applied where there is volume and stable rules, not where there is expectation.
Key takeaways
Four things before the call
- 01
The expensive failure mode here is the invented date or requirement. An applicant who misses an enrolment window over a wrong answer does not complain: they leave.
- 02
So the rule is that every date and requirement comes from the in-force official document, cited, and when it is not there the system says so and escalates.
- 03
Where it pays most is admissions: high volume, repeated questions, documented answers and a narrow window in which the applicant decides.
- 04
We do not build it to grade or assess students. The academic decision stays with the teacher, and that boundary is defined in writing before building.
This is where the data comes in
An AI system is worth what its sources are worth. These are the standard connectors; anything with an API or a database connects the same way, and what has no API is handled by file.
SAP
Enterprise ERP
Oracle
ERP and database
NetSuite
Cloud ERP
Salesforce
CRM and service
HubSpot
CRM and marketing
PostgreSQL
Database and pgvector
Microsoft SQL
Database
Snowflake
Data warehouse
BigQuery
Google data warehouse
Databricks
Data platform
Redshift
AWS data warehouse
Synapse
Azure data warehouse
Supabase
Managed Postgres
Workday
Payroll and HR
QuickBooks
Accounting
Sage
Accounting and ERP
Xero
Cloud accounting
Shopify
Catalogue and orders
WooCommerce
Catalogue and orders
Magento
Catalogue and orders
Stripe
Payments and subscriptions
Google Drive
Documents and folders
CSV y Excel
Flat files
Nothing in this category
A RAG system in production: three years, two million users
We built and operated the assistant for a loyalty platform serving more than two million active users across ten countries.
We built the full pipeline: document ingestion and normalization, chunking, embedding generation, vector store on Azure AI Search and Pinecone, and retrieval with grounded generation on LangChain.
We held it above 99% availability for three years.
RAG systems →Frequently asked questions
01 How do you stop it inventing an enrolment date?
Three things, and none of them is the prompt. Effective dates go in as mandatory metadata at ingestion, so the system filters by period before ranking instead of taking the closest-looking document. The answer cites the document and shows its date, so the reader can verify. And it gets measured: against a set validated by admissions, what share of dates and requirements matches the in-force document. That number is handed over before it opens to applicants.
02 Can it grade assignments or assess students?
We do not build it for that, and it is a decision rather than a technical limit. A grade is an academic act with a responsible person behind it, and automating it shifts that responsibility onto a system that cannot carry it. What we do build is the administrative layer around it: requirements, dates, procedures, request status and first-line support, which is where the volume is.
03 Does it integrate with our LMS or student information system?
Yes, over API or an MCP server against Moodle, Canvas, Blackboard or an in-house system. With integration it can say "your application has been under review since the 12th"; without it, it can only explain how the process works. We recommend starting with the document layer — which already covers most admissions volume — and adding integration afterwards, measuring what it adds.
04 Is this for a school or only for a university?
It depends on query volume and the state of the documentation, not on size. A school with a concentrated admissions season and several hundred families asking the same things has a clear case. One where queries run in the dozens and the front office copes does not, and we say so on the first call.
05 What about student data?
Data on minors is sensitive and the design assumes it. The index holds institutional documentation — calendar, regulations, requirements — not student information. When an answer needs a specific person’s data it is fetched over API at that moment and not persisted. We use enterprise plans where data sent is not used for training, and deploy inside the institution’s infrastructure when the case requires it.
06 How long does it take, and when in the year should we do it?
Four to six weeks to production for an admissions scope, with something running from week one. Timing matters more here than in other sectors: it should be live before the enrolment season opens, not during it, because the peak is exactly when you cannot be adjusting things. It is quoted with fixed scope, price and date in a proposal 48 hours after the first call.
Fifteen minutes. A concrete answer.
It gets fixed, it gets built, or it is not worth it. And if the diagnostic does not reach three actionable findings, it is not charged.