AI at Galvia

Galvia is working with one of Ireland’s leading universities, the National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG), in upgrading their student services with a pioneering AI-powered platform.

For the first time ever the University provides 24/7/365 personalised and responsible information on student queries through a digital assistant named Cara (meaning ‘friend’ in Gaelic). Cara integrates with existing apps including WhatsApp, enabling students to find information anywhere, anytime.

Cara, launched in January 2022, is described by NUI Galway Student Services staff as a “finger on the pulse” of campus life. Furthermore the platform is doing the heavy lifting for staff, providing answers to thousands of frequently asked questions (almost 100 a day), reducing mundane tasks by 40% and saving more than 500 staff hours over a six-month period.

Now Student Services staff members have the freedom to focus on their primary goal: supporting and encouraging students through every step of their University journey.

 Supporting Mental Health                                                                                                                                            The University is also discovering that students are reaching out to Cara when feeling lonely or depressed, revealing that the AI platform is to be an integral part of a multifaceted solution in addressing rising student mental health and well-being issues both on and off campus. For example students can type into Cara “I’m feeling lonely”, and Cara will direct them to the supports available to them.

A 2021 survey conducted by NUI Galway found that over a third of students have experienced some form of depression and anxiety over the past year. Feelings of disconnection and isolation were widespread among the 5,000 surveyed.

According to Josephine Walsh, Head of Student Engagement Projects: “It’s a great comfort to us to know that students who have those (mental health) needs and choose to tell Cara, that Cara will respond in an appropriate way, directing them to counselling services, encouraging them to reach out, getting them the help or connections they need.”

Decision Intelligence
The beauty of the Galvia platform for NUI Galway is that it is continuously collecting vital data on student’s journeys through the University and it is continually learning from data. Galvia’s AI platform deploys decision intelligence technology taking data science to a new level.

In a more traditional decision making process you collect data, you visualise it and find insights through dashboards or reports; stakeholders use those insights to make decisions. It’s a very iterative and linear process, vulnerable to human bias and often time consuming.

But today with the exponential growth of data collection and the digital disruption across all industries, traditional processes are becoming more unsustainable.

In contrast, decision intelligence allows your organisation to take your traditional decision-making processes and combine them with advanced technologies – like AI, ML, intelligent apps, and natural language programming (NLP) – to transform data dashboards and business analytics into more comprehensive decision-support platforms.

So now you are making decisions based more on just past performance. You can start to ask questions like, “how will this decision affect my company next year?” You can focus on what matters most.

Galvia’s decision intelligence platform draws on comparable insights from the university’s historical data to create a picture of the present, and identify patterns (through simple graphic and visualisations), which enables university staff to spot student issues early, identify at-risk students and trigger faster more effective support.

Content Management System
Furthermore the Content Management System (CMS) allows Student Services to control, collect and organise knowledge and resources in one single source. Our customisable dashboards show the information that matters to the team and simplify the knowledge sharing process between various departments.

In summary, Galvia’s AI platform utilises Conversational AI, Machine Learning and Decision Intelligence to empower NUI Galway to:

Provide faster, more meaningful student services at scale
Automate repetitive tasks
Collects vital data on student’s journey presented back to the institution through simple graphics and visualisations to support decision making
Improve workflows
Reduce costs

From discovering curriculum to admissions, onboarding and campus support, the platform can be deployed anywhere (in the cloud or on premise), is fully customised to meet unique objectives and is designed to safeguard students’ success and improve student retention.