Student AI assistant streamlines onboarding and support at scale across 30+ languages and multiple channels.
Problem
Up Education has always prioritised providing personalised support to students — especially during critical intake periods. However, meeting high service standards across thousands of messages, in multiple languages, and often with urgent timelines, placed a heavy operational burden on support teams.
Most communication historically took place via email, which made it difficult to scale or adapt quickly to students’ preferences for messaging platforms like WeChat and WhatsApp. With increasing international enrolments — particularly from China — and a desire to offer a smoother onboarding experience, Up Education saw an opportunity to extend their support model using AI to meet students where they are, across their preferred channels and languages.
Solution
We delivered "Ask Craig", a multilingual conversational AI assistant capable of responding across three key channels — WeChat, WhatsApp, and Outlook email. Students receive support in 30+ languages, and the assistant maintains a persistent chat history, allowing students to return to their conversations at any time. After an initial POC the solution deployed to Production with:
- Logging for post analysis, to measure sentiment and identify opportunities to improve the service
- Fallback handling for unknown or off-topic queries
- Conversational quality monitoring, using Langfuse and LLM-as-judge evaluation for every message
The assistant is powered by a RAG architecture, ensuring answers are always grounded in curated content. Where confidence is low or the topic is outside scope, conversations are automatically flagged or routed for human review.
Results
In seven weeks Ask Craig is now live in pilot across Auckland campuses and actively supporting students through their onboarding journey. Students receive clear, timely answers — in their language and on their preferred platform — improving both student satisfaction and staff capacity during peak periods.
The solution is delivering process improvements with consistent tagging and categorisation of student queries. This allows Up Education to gain clearer insights into common friction points during onboarding, and with built-in quality monitoring and fallback handling, teams can trust the assistant while maintaining oversight.
Technologies
