Revolutionizing Student Support with AI: Jisc Pilot Results

In today’s rapidly evolving higher education landscape, institutions face mounting pressure to provide seamless, scalable student support while managing operational costs. Enter LearnWise AI, the AI-powered support platform built for universities. In collaboration with Jisc and 12 partner institutions, LearnWise has completed a groundbreaking pilot—and the results are a game-changer. Among the institutions were eight further education colleges, and four higher education institutions: Bath Spa University, Gloucestershire College, Kirklees College, Roehampton University, Shipley College, South Staffordshire College, The City of Liverpool College, University of Westminster, and Weston College.

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How LearnWise helped Institutions

Pilot participants had full choice of where to implement LearnWise AI, with many of them opting to add additional implementations during the pilot period, running multiple assistants at once. Though LearnWise is primarily positioned as a student support tool, several pilot participants were interested in discovering whether LearnWise could support staff, implementing assistants aimed at supporting institutional staff CPD and more.

The pilot explored a wide range of use cases, including:

• Supporting students' pre-enrolment
• Supporting newly enrolled students with induction
• Student support queries
• Support students with course resources, and course-specific resources
• Enhancing staff support, e.g. TEF framework, CPD

During the pilot, the AI assistant was situated across different platforms, including:

• Sharepoint
• Canvas
• Moodle
• Blackboard
• myday by Ready Education

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Pilot Objectives: Scaling Personalized AI Support

The pilot institutions shared several common objectives:

• Improving student support while reducing pressure on staff resources, enhancing access to information outside of office hours and providing students with immediate responses to common queries.
• Assessing institutional readiness for generative AI adoption: several pilot participants took the opportunity to gauge staff and student engagement with AI tools, while others positioned the pilot as an exercise to determine whether ai chatbots could support broader digital transformation initiatives.

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Wins with Learnwise: AI Chatbot for Higher Education

Pilot participants mentioned key features that made implementation easier:

• The technical setup process of their LearnWise chatbot was straightforward and efficient. Several described the integration as seamless!
• Participants appreciated the ability to customize their chatbots, giving them unique names, welcome messages and conversation shortcuts specifically written for their intended audiences.
• Institutions who implemented multiple chatbots appreciated the ability to manage them all from a single dashboard, ensuring a consistent experience across different use cases.
• LearnWise was able to develop quick, clear answers and had the ability to pull relevant information from the institution-specific resources it was given. Some institutions had previously encountered issues with chatbot "hallucinations" (incorrect or misleading responses) - but LearnWise's AI chatbot performed reliably, with highly accurate answers and minimal errors.
• LearnWise was praised for its impeccable escalation routes, enabling staff to set up referral information even for external services, such as Samaritans, when necessary - mitigating concerns around chatbot suitability for handling sensitive topics and conversations.
• One particular plus observed was LearnWise AI's ability to provide detailed performance analytics, allowing institutions to monitor chatbot interactions and refine responses accordingly. For this, LearnWise's improvement feature came in handy, allowing adjustments needed to resources to be flagged and organized into a worklist. In this way, some pilot participants used insights from user interactions to widen the scope of resources provided to the chatbot too, for example, adding mental health and wellbeing guidance to support vulnerable students.
• Institutions who implemented staff use cases still saw valuable impact on supporting staff with CPD and general professional practices in some instances by facilitating better navigation of professional development resources.

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Key Findings: AI-Driven Support Transforms Student Engagement

The LearnWise pilot demonstrated a 30% reduction in support tickets, significantly enhancing response times and reducing administrative burden. By leveraging AI-powered automation, institutions were able to provide instant, verifiable assistance to students, faculty, and staff across academic, administrative, and IT queries.

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How LearnWise AI Made an Impact

• ‍Seamless LMS & Portal Integration – Working across Moodle, Canvas, Blackboard, MyDay, CampusM, and more, LearnWise embedded directly within student ecosystems.
• ‍24/7 AI Assistance – Always-on support ensured students received answers anytime, anywhere, without delays.
• ‍Automated Workflows – AI smart-routing efficiently connected students to the right departments, improving institutional response times.
• ‍Enhanced Student Engagement – AI-powered academic assistance, study tools, and real-time insights empowered students to take charge of their learning experience.

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Scalable, Cost-Effective Student Support

One of the biggest takeaways? AI doesn’t just cut costs—it enhances the student experience. Institutions that integrated LearnWise saw an immediate impact in workload reduction, enabling support teams to focus on complex, high-value interactions while AI handled repetitive inquiries.

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What’s Next? Bringing AI-Powered Support to More Institutions

With the success of this pilot, LearnWise AI is poised to scale its impact across more universities, ensuring institutions can deliver personalized, ethical, and efficient AI-driven support.

Want to see LearnWise in action? Let’s discuss how your institution can leverage AI for smarter student support. Book a demo here.