The Full Story
University of Glasgow (UoG) built on their earlier success with their main chatbot “Gilbert” (launched Nov 2020) and a Short Courses Bot (late 2021) by integrating them with ChatGPT. The idea was to supplement their bots’ capabilities. Gilbert continued to handle broad inquiries but was enhanced to automatically pick up harder questions via ChatGPT. The Short Courses Bot, with more constrained scope, was given more autonomous control using ChatGPT. Both bots received real time data from the Glasgow website to stay up to date.
Within twelve days of integrating ChatGPT, they saw measurable improvements. Success rates rose above 95%. Over 1,300 previously unanswered questions could now be handled. Students got responses in under six seconds on average, and feedback from those involved rose significantly. They also enabled multilingual support (including English, Hindi, Arabic, Mandarin), widened reach and improved satisfaction.
Glasgow also changed their enquiry infrastructure. They removed their phone based call center during peak periods, replacing it with the bot plus live chat plus form plus enquiry modules. This reallocation of effort allowed staff to focus on quality rather than volume, and students benefited from almost instantaneous answers rather than delayed emails or calls.
Their experience shows how rapid deployment (under a minute to set up the ChatGPT component), smart use of hybrid human and AI approaches, and feeding AI with real time data can yield big gains in satisfaction, coverage, and efficiency, without proportionally increasing staffing.