This is a phase-one pilot with an international education group in New Zealand. We connected AI to three systems the client already used: Zoho CRM, Outlook and Microsoft Teams. When a new domestic lead lands in Zoho, the agent sends a personalised first email and a booking link, and leads who book are routed to a counsellor. The pilot moved to this line after the 2026-07-30 phase-one review, and the agent went live in Teams on 2026-08-21–22. Status: Pilot · Demo.
How it worked before
On the domestic side, new leads sat in the CRM and counsellors called them one by one, with no way to tell who was most interested. At a 2026-07-31 meeting the client estimated the backlog at around 2,300 new leads (client's estimate, not checked against a CRM export). On the international side, follow-up between offer and enrolment was also manual.
What AI does now, and what people do
The split is simple: the agent makes first contact and flags, people judge and talk. WhatsApp was deferred this phase because it needs live human oversight, so the pilot closes the loop by email first.
- AI does: Sends a personalised first email and booking link when a lead enters Zoho, flags leads who book as high-intent and queues them for counsellors; in a test environment, flags admitted students whose visa has stalled and drafts a follow-up email; works with the team inside Teams.
- People do: Counsellors take every booked lead; staff review visa follow-up drafts and decide whether to send; all course and admissions advice stays with people.
Timeline
Dates below come from project records.
- 2026-07-20Production data access was not yet open, so we ran the first half of the admissions flow on our own test data.
- 2026-07-30Phase-one review: international admissions build paused, focus moved to domestic lead screening.
- 2026-08-21Through 08-22, the agent was deployed on site in Microsoft Teams and passed end-to-end acceptance.
- 2026-08-31Solution meeting set the next step: handle enquiries no one was following up, starting with a single pilot course.
- 2026-09-10Phase-two direction agreed (an AI course advisor with multi-turn chat, a controlled knowledge base and Bookings self-scheduling), planned for about two months.
Current status and limits
Lead screening is a pilot, and visa follow-up has only been validated in a test environment. As of the 2026-09-10 records there is no tracked change in conversion, so we report no outcome numbers. The phase-two course advisor is still being built and has no results yet.
What we learned
During the Teams rollout one secret was entered in the wrong field. Every check passed; only a real message exposed it. We now include sending a real message in go-live acceptance, and we updated the install guide.
Scope note: an anonymised case is a summary of project records with client names, people and amounts removed. This page draws on those records; client names, people and amounts are withheld. Dates and figures come from project records and some have not been confirmed in writing by the client. The delivery status is as labelled at the top; results vary with each business’s systems, data and involvement and are not a promise to other businesses.