Over the past five years of coaching and guiding students to achieve their higher education and career goals, InsideTrack has recorded 21 million emails, 5 million text messages and more than 1 million phone calls. With help from Salesforce, a new AI tool will put this data to work. The agentic AI will generate summaries of coaching sessions, identify focus areas and trends, and recommend next steps, according to a news release Tuesday.
Dr. Tim Renick, founding executive director of the National Institute for Student Success at Georgia State University and a member of InsideTrack's advisory board, said the innovation stands to make a difference by leaving more time for human coaches to build relationships.
“For years, we've used data to identify which students are at risk and when they need support,” Renick said in a public statement. “But knowing who needs help isn't enough. We must build tools that give frontline staff the time and capacity to respond to alerts quickly and to provide the guidance and support that truly change outcomes.”
Through Salesforce’s Agents for Impact accelerator program, InsideTrack will receive $333,000 in funding, access to Salesforce products for two years and expert guidance for one year. According to the news release, InsideTrack staff have been meeting with Salesforce teams weekly since early this year, hosting interviews with internal coaches and managers and attending workshops with other grantees of the program. InsideTrack's coaches will start using a beta version of the new AI tool this summer.
In addition to InsideTrack, Salesforce's Agents for Impact program has worked with other education-focused organizations such as College Possible and Per Scholas. This follows the growing prevalence of AI tools across higher education — an EDUCAUSE study in February found more than half of institutions are now using AI for curriculum and administrative workflows.
“As institutions navigate rapid changes in student demographics and technology, AI adoption must support — not erode — the human relationships that ultimately drive student success,” InsideTrack President Ruth Bauer said in a public statement. “By anchoring this work in the experiences of students, coaches and advisors, we're building the kind of human-centered AI tools that can unlock staff capacity and help more students achieve their educational and career aspirations.”
