Campus Technology Insider Podcast December 2024
Listen: How Generative AI Is Answering Student Questions at Bryant University
Rhea Kelly 00:00
Hello and welcome to the Campus Technology Insider podcast. I'm Rhea Kelly, editor in chief of Campus Technology, and your host.
At the start of each academic year, a thousand new Bryant University students come to campus brimming with questions about everything from class registration and building locations to dining hall hours and WiFi connectivity. And thanks to the power of generative AI, they can get their answers from Ask Tupper, a next-generation chatbot designed from the ground up at the university. For this episode of the podcast, we spoke with Chris Stephenson, managing director of intelligent automation, AI, and digital services at AI solution provider alliantDigital, and Chuck LoCurto, VP for information services and CIO at Bryant, about how Ask Tupper started, what's possible now with AI-powered chatbots, lessons learned from the project, and more. Here's our chat.
Chuck and Chris, welcome to the podcast.
Chris Stephenson 01:13
Thanks for having us today.
Rhea Kelly 01:16
So I thought we'd start by just having you each introduce yourself and tell me a little bit about your background.
Chuck LoCurto 01:23
Sure, I'll go first. This is Chuck LoCurto, I'm the Vice President and Chief Information Officer here at Bryant. I am coming up on 13 years. I spent 20 years at Textron, primarily Textron Financial and Textron corporate enterprise apps. I was, sort of my 20 years there, I spent seven, my last seven there as the CIO for the finance segment. So I've had the privilege of having this, this IT role for the past, what is it, I guess, nearly, my gosh, nearly 20 years. Kind of crazy. I do a lot of other fun things, fun things at Bryant that usually catches most people's attention. I coach the Division 1 diving team as part of the swimming and diving program. I started and coached it for eight years, and now I just help on occasion. But my background, you know, my background is in IT. Got my masters at RPI back in the day. And I think that probably summarizes enough. If you have more questions, feel free to ask. I can go deeper.
Rhea Kelly 02:29
Go deeper with the diving background, please. I can't resist. So Chris, how about you?
Chris Stephenson 02:38
My name is Chris Stevenson. I, I'm the Managing Director here at Alliant on emerging technology, which includes AI, automation and digital services. I've spent really the last 25 years of my career in emerging technology, ranging all the way from when the internet first came out, through the, through the mobile phase, through the social phase, and now through this, this new AI phase. I work with most industries with this type of work, but I always find myself, especially as new technologies really starting to emerge, working back with with different higher ed organizations, because that's where, honestly, a lot of the technology starts to become real.
Rhea Kelly 03:18
So earlier this year, Bryant announced the launch of a new gen AI chatbot called Ask Tupper. So could you just kind of take me back? How did that project start?
Chuck LoCurto 03:30
So, you know, that's interesting. Sometimes these things are a blur, you know, because, you know, in, in higher ed, and probably most places, but I think more so in higher ed, you know, your customer base, if you will, changes by 25% — 25% of your customers leave you, you get 25% more customers every year, right? Your seniors graduate, the freshmen come in. So, you know, we're a school of about, let's just call it 4,000. A thousand seniors leaving, a thousand freshmen come in, and they all have the same questions, you know? So you got a thousand students asking the same 50 questions, which is 50,000 questions — they're answer shopping, trying, trying to, trying to find the right answer. You know, with this notion of a generative AI chatbot, I remember the day we settled in on it, but it had been really gnawing at me as to how we could, we got to find a better self-service way for answers. And whether, you know, I don't, honestly don't recall if I got the idea from an article or a webinar, but when it happened was, you know, one of our board members said to me, "Chuck, I got to introduce you to one of our tech guys at alliantDigital. You know, he's really good. He's really, got to talk to him." So, so we, we set up a call, and we got on it, we got on a Teams call. And, you know, Chris said, you know, "We're starting to work on, on, on, on chatbots," kind of in this area that we were both collectively talking about. And he's like, "I could probably demo it for if you send me some data." Like, you don't have to ask me twice to send you data. So we, I don't think we hung up the call I'm like, "Here, take this," and I sent him links to our employee handbook, our policies and procedures, student handbook, and pieces of all of our external data. So it was a very safe way for me to share stuff, because I was sharing stuff that was already out on the internet that we probably wanted people to find, that they couldn't find. Right? So, you know, I sent that over to Chris, and that's where the idea got spawned, is really from that, that first call that we had first. I think, like a week later, I'd have to check my calendar, but let's just say a week or two later, we're, we're seeing a pilot. We're seeing, we're seeing a prototype of this thing.