Picture this. You’ve just checked into a hotel. You’re excited, you’ve done your research and your phone pings. “Thanks for choosing us. Here’s a link to our brochure and hotel guide.” Fine. Helpful enough. A bit generic, but you’re not going to complain.
Now imagine a different message. “Welcome, we’re so glad you’re here. What are you most looking forward to this week?” You reply that you’re into water sports, you’re an early bird and you love food. Within seconds you get back a list of morning activities, the three best nearby restaurants and a note saying if you need anything during your stay, just drop a text.
That’s not a futuristic experience. That’s what students are already getting from the tools they use every day. And it’s becoming the standard against which your communications are being measured, whether you like it or not.
The standard has shifted
Students are using AI constantly, getting responses that are instant, personalised and genuinely useful. Then they get a bulk email from their university and the contrast couldn’t be starker.
This isn’t about technology for its own sake. It’s about expectation. When a student can get a useful, personalised response from a free tool that remembers how they like to communicate, a generic catchall message to a broad list starts to feel like a different era entirely.
The good news is that the same capability is available to admissions and recruitment teams right now. The question is how to use it well.
Start with who you’re talking to
Before you send a single message, the most important decision you’ll make is who you’re actually talking to and why. Segmentation isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s the foundation everything else is built on.
That might mean filtering by application stage, deposit status, event attendance or course interest. The point is that a well-defined audience makes everything downstream more effective. The message lands better, the AI response is more relevant and the follow-up is more likely to prompt action.
There’s also a meaningful difference between a message that pushes information and one that opens a conversation. “Here’s a link to our brochure” and “what’s your biggest question right now?” use the same channel but create completely different experiences. One is a broadcast. The other is the start of something.
Why SMS and not just email
Email still has a role. It’s trusted, good for detailed information and most teams are comfortable with it. But it’s a crowded space. Inboxes are full and the chances of cutting through with a broad message are getting slimmer.
SMS is different. It’s immediate, visible and gets responses at a rate email can’t match. SMS gets seven and a half times more responses than email. For teams trying to move students from one stage of the journey to the next, that difference matters.
And it can be just as personalised. Template tags, contact data, event details: everything you’d use to personalise an email works just as well in a text.
Where AI changes the game
Once a conversation starts, AI can handle a significant amount of the back and forth. It responds instantly, at any hour, drawing on your institution’s own content rather than generic information from the internet. For students asking about costs, housing, deadlines or next steps, that means a useful, personalised answer in seconds.
Around 30% of inquiries come in outside of office hours. Students aren’t waiting until 9am to ask questions, and institutions that can meet them in the moment make a stronger impression than those that can’t.
AI also frees up staff to focus on conversations that genuinely need a human. Complex queries, sensitive situations, students who need more than information: that’s where your team adds the most value. The routine stuff, AI can handle without anyone lifting a finger.
Automation that responds to behaviour
The real power comes when you chain things together. Rather than a one-off message, think about a sequence that responds to what students actually do.
A student gets admitted. You send a text asking what their biggest question is. AI handles the reply. Three days later, if they still haven’t paid their deposit, they get an invitation to an upcoming event. Six days in, a gentle email goes to their parents. Nine days in, they’re automatically added to a call list.
At every stage, if the student takes the action you were hoping for, they drop out of the sequence. No more nudges, no more chasing. And while it takes real thought to set up well, once it’s built it runs. It can be cloned and reused for different audiences, different stages and different goals.
Putting it to work
The University of Derby ran their AI chatbot for 12 weeks and handled 30,000 messages, saving over 1,200 hours of staff time. That’s around 50 hours saved per thousand messages. The more students engage, the more time gets freed up for the work that only humans can do.
That time saving isn’t just an operational win. It’s what allows teams to be more thoughtful, more proactive and more human in the conversations that actually matter.
The shift worth making
Reactive workflows still have their place. A student registers for an event, they get a confirmation and a reminder. That should keep running. But proactive outreach, reaching out based on what you already know about a student rather than waiting for them to act, is where the real gains are.
The teams doing this well aren’t working harder. They’re working with better tools, better data and a clearer sense of who they’re talking to and why.
If every inquiry got a response in under a minute and your outreach was genuinely conversational rather than broadcast, what would your team do with the time they got back? That’s not a hypothetical question anymore.
Want to see it in action? We ran a live walkthrough covering everything in this article. Watch the recording here.
