Macquarie University develops AI bot to handle academic inquiries

Macquarie University has developed an AI bot to handle student inquiries related to academic requirements and course materials.

Macquarie University
iStock

The Sydney-based university piloted the tool on 1000 first-year psychology students, training it on internal data such as lectures and questions submitted to tutors from the previous term.

Known as ‘AI Peer’, the bot's primary aim is to free up tutors and academics from answering basic questions related to their course.

Speaking at a Salesforce conference in Sydney, chief information and digital officer (CIDO) Jonathan Covell said AI Peer answers "the questions that you might ask your tutor or your peer in class” about a course or syllabus. 

"[AI Peer] is really allowing the students to not only get an immediate reaction, but it's also allowing the tutors and the academics to focus on the real questions,” he said.

As an example, Covell said the tool fielded over 8000 questions from students over a two-day period in the week before final exams last year.

It is trained on Macquarie University-owned assets and is not able to search the internet or other databases. 

AI Peer's development follows Macquarie University replacing its legacy CRM system with Salesforce last year.

Covell told the audience that the university is continuing to implement Salesforce and is looking at “rolling out things like [Salesforce’s autonomous AI application] Agentforce”.

“We're putting a significant amount of effort in our budget into this year to educating our staff and some of our students around what AI is and what it isn't; what it can do and what it can’t,” he added.