Case study: Cialfo embraces AI driven analytics to empower students

Cialfo is an edtech company harnessing an AI-powered analytics solution to help connect students, higher education institutions, counsellors and parents.

The Singapore-based business had three opportunities for its customers, according to William Hund, co-founder and chief product officer at Cialfo, which all needed an AI-powered, data driven solution.

“The first of which was rebuilding our reporting suite for our high school customers. The second was for our university customers, we built a data intelligence tool to help them understand where international students are coming from within our network and where they might be interested in studying,” he said.

“Thirdly, we built tools for our internal use case, we're a growing organisation, and our data demands are getting more complex over time.”

Different teams need data to be able to make better decisions, said Hund so Cialfo partnered with Sisense, which allowed them to accelerate that dramatically.

Hund said the real impact of using an AI driven solution is not only can deliver their product but iterate on it quickly, which is important.

“When it comes to our university side of the platform, it was all done in the last 18 months to two years, it's new. This doesn't exist much in the international student recruitment market. When it comes to high school market, that's a far more mature product has been out for five years.

“What is valuable from Sisense is the speed we can learn how to create value for our customers. So we can do it really quickly, we can iterate really quickly,” he said.

If Cialfo didn’t have the technology, it would have taken them at least a year to engineer something similar, Hund said.  

“When I wanted to change, everything needs to go through a robust change process. We took a project that would have taken a year to develop with a couple of engineers down to something that took three months.

“It was a lot faster and a lot cheaper, once we had made the investment in the entire data pipeline and Sisense to be able to bring new features to the market,” he said.