AWS Public Sector Blog
Doing more with less in higher education: How institutions drive efficiency with AI and automation on AWS
As colleges and universities navigate budget constraints, hiring freezes, and evolving regulations, they are embracing new approaches to increasing operational efficiency while also improving the experiences of students, faculty, and staff.
Forward-thinking higher education leaders are using artificial intelligence (AI) and automation from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to transform their operations while reducing costs. These institutions aren’t just adopting new technology—they’re reimagining core processes to create ongoing improvements that enhance both operational efficiency and the student experience.
Enhancing student experiences through AI-powered services
Student expectations are higher than ever. As universities and colleges aim to deliver exceptional student services, AI and automation offer multiple avenues for efficient, cost-effective solutions that provide students the support they need.
The University of Texas at Austin demonstrates this transformation in action through its reimagined student support model. By launching a contact center on Amazon Connect, they substantially reduced student wait times from over 15 minutes to less than 30 seconds, all while maintaining similar staffing levels. This improvement didn’t require additional personnel—instead, it leveraged cloud technology to make existing staff more effective at scale.
Digital self-service represents another high-impact area for improving student experiences. Georgia State University collaborated with AWS Partner Slalom to replace its legacy system with an AWS serverless solution. The new self-service solution now serves over 50,000 students with up-to-date alerts for course schedules, bills, financial aid, and other administrative tasks. Beyond improved student experiences, this approach delivered a remarkable cost-efficiency, with a first-month compute bill of just $375.
Taking student service automation further, Dallas College used AWS to launch a generative AI-enabled, multi-channel conversational chatbot trained on institutional data. This intelligent system handles common inquiries in multiple languages without staff intervention and creates a 24/7 support resource for students while allowing staff to focus on deeper, one-on-one engagements where human expertise adds more value.
The impact of these innovations becomes particularly evident in specialized student service areas like financial aid, where institutions typically face an overwhelming volume of routine status inquiries. Recognizing this challenge, Highline College developed a financial aid tracker with AWS that allows students to automatically check their application status. Rather than waiting in phone queues or visiting offices in person, students check their application status through a self-service portal. Highline College saw a 75 percent reduction in emails, calls, and in-person visits about application status as students received answers instantly and fundamentally shifted how the financial aid team could reallocate their time and expertise to higher-value work.
Streamlining administrative processes with intelligent automation
Behind the scenes, administrative processes often consume disproportionate staff time across higher education institutions. Document-intensive operations in admissions, procurement, and research administration present a significant opportunity for intelligent automation to augment or reduce staff workload.
Illinois Institute of Technology tackled the labor-intensive process of transcript processing by working with AWS Partner Quantiphi. The solution—built using AWS generative AI and machine learning (ML)—automates the entire workflow from document intake through student record updates, international grade conversions, and customer relationship management (CRM) integration. This streamlined process reduced the prospective student credential evaluation process from 4-6 weeks to a single day, so faculty, decision-makers, and students can make enrollment decisions faster.
Procurement departments face similar efficiency challenges, particularly around contract development and review. ScopeBuilder is a generative AI tool that uses AWS to enhance scope development for contracts, bids, requests for proposals, and statements of work. Through a conversational AI interface, the system guides users through creating comprehensive documents in real-time, making procurement more efficient while maintaining institutional standards. Developed by students at the California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) Digital Transformation Hub (DxHub)—an AWS Cloud Innovation Center (CIC)—ScopeBuilder helps university procurement specialists structure contracts effectively and reduce the risk of project delays or misunderstandings.
Research administration is another document and review-intensive area that benefits from similar approaches. Many institutions are now leveraging cloud-enabled intelligent document processing (IDP) solutions to significantly accelerate review processes that previously consumed valuable faculty and staff time while supporting consistency with institutional requirements.
Addressing safety, compliance, and productivity needs
The applications of AI and automation extend beyond the core academic and administrative functions to other critical institutional needs like safety, compliance, and broader productivity challenges.
Campus safety is one area where manual monitoring is both expensive and often ineffective. Eastern Michigan University addressed this challenge by deploying AI from AWS Partner Zero Eyes for video surveillance. This technology helps security teams identify and respond to potential threats more effectively than traditional approaches, improving campus safety while using security resources more efficiently.
Regulatory requirements present another growing challenge for institutions, particularly as new compliance requirements emerge. When recent web accessibility regulations created an urgent need for digital content remediation, Ohio State University collaborated with students at Arizona State University’s Cloud Innovation Center to develop an automated PDF remediation solution. This solution uses AI and machine learning on AWS with AWS Partner Adobe’s API tooling to automatically identify and correct accessibility gaps in PDFs. Available for other institutions through an open source license, the Remediate My PDF solution makes content accessible to all students while substantially reducing the manual effort and cost typically required for compliance—transforming what would have been a massive staffing challenge into a manageable automated process.
Beyond these targeted applications, proactive institutions are discovering broader productivity gains through generative AI platforms deployed across multiple campus functions. Vanderbilt University leads in this area with its Amplify GenAI tool, which provides a safe environment for students and faculty to experiment with and develop solutions. This platform includes agents for automating routine tasks such as formatting documents in university templates and creating lesson plans, showing how generative AI can drive efficiencies across the entire institution rather than just in specific departments. This open-source solution is available for other institutions to implement and build on for their campuses.
Rethinking processes: A necessary step for technology success
While AI and automation tools deliver powerful capabilities, implementing them to create successful, efficient processes takes more than technology—it demands a fundamental rethinking of how work gets done.
This often means revisiting long-standing procedures. For example, does every travel expense transaction truly require manual approval when AI can detect anomalies more efficiently? Successful transformation requires leadership willing to challenge established systems and embrace the new approaches made possible by cloud technologies.
For leaders seeking guidance on increasing institutional efficiency using AI and automation technologies, the AWS Higher Education team provides dedicated industry expertise and cloud solutions designed to drive efficiency at scale. Contact the AWS Higher Education team today, and they’ll meet you where you are in your institutional efficiency and student experience journey. We work with university financial leaders, business unit staff, and IT departments to identify the right solutions and services to meet your goals.
Ready to explore what’s possible for your institution? Connect with the AWS Higher Education team today.