Efficiency and beyond: Is your university sitting on an AI data goldmine?

The education sector is under pressure to evolve from all sides. While modernising efficiency and student experience using AI tools is a burning priority, there’s an even bigger potential opportunity that leverages unique assets that faculties have built up over decades.

AI offers educators endless possibilities, but one of the most prominent and immediate impacts has been the proliferation of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and many others.

LLMs feed on vast volumes of available data to generate outputs that are essentially best guesses based on historical data. Over time, as they devour and train on more of the world’s available data, their responses will become better in quality but also more homogenous as they trend towards an average best answer.

This raises important questions:

What will give educational institutions a differentiating edge?

Where will the original academic ideas that move knowledge forward come from?

How will invaluable commercial breakthroughs be developed to improve society?

Potential breakthroughs in university research departments

One unique asset universities have in abundance is decades of rich knowledge and original data. From medicine, law and engineering to humanities, business, IT and agriculture – and everything in between – each faculty holds a wealth of knowledge, research media and data that is often dormant and untapped.

Imagine applying the advanced computing power of AI and analytics to unearth insights, correlations and innovations hidden within deep datasets such as asthma patient health records, demographics of convicted criminals, photos of planetary alignment over time, public opinions on climate change, business efficiency, water pollutant concentrations or crop yields.

A powerful example of how intelligent data analytics can drive groundbreaking discoveries and meaningful societal change is Ohalo Genetics’ boosted breeding technique. Using precise genome transfer, it combines beneficial traits to increase crop yields with a process that could take millennia using traditional breeding methods.

One data-driven innovation like this has the potential to transform global agriculture in the face of climate change by enabling crops to thrive in harsh environments while reducing costs and environmental impact.

While developing and applying the machine learning models needed to deliver real-life outcomes is a longer-term opportunity, it all starts with understanding and preparing your data.

For example, Nexon is working with another Australian University to consolidate, integrate and migrate over a petabyte of research data from various disconnected on-premise and legacy systems into a modern Cloud platform that could be made accessible to AI tools. This dataset includes, among many other topics, in-depth studies on horse husbandry that could have implications for the agricultural sector.

Over time, applying the latest evolving AI tools to the data universities already have has the potential to unlock insights that advance society and could be worth billions of dollars to your institution.

Proven efficiencies in teaching and learning

In the short term, the use of data and AI in the teaching and learning side of education is clear and proven. Nexon recently partnered with Western Sydney University (WSU) to consolidate 11 disconnected student contact centres into an integrated multichannel cloud communications platform.

By leveraging the latest Cloud platforms, communications and AI, WSU gained significant benefits:

90% improvement in voice abandonment rates

65% improvement in average speed of answer

Seamless conversations integrated across voice, messaging, SMS and WhatsApp

We also collaborated with another Australian University to develop a self-service chatbot to help students research and assess which courses might suit their career and learning goals. This eases the burden on student services and accelerates the registration process as students can identify and select what best suits their needs.

To see where this is heading globally, the recent launch of Klarna’s new AI assistant powered by OpenAI created big waves. In its first month, it held 2.3 million conversations without a drop in satisfaction rates, did the work of 700 full-time agents and drove ~USD 40 million in projected annual profit improvements for the buy-now-pay-later app.

Whether for strategic research applications or streamlining staff and student experiences, the first step for any educational institution is to get their data in order.

At Nexon, we work closely with leading universities to take advantage of AI’s immediate benefits and prepare their data for the emerging opportunities that arise every day.