Key wins
- 4 weeks from project launch to first agent live in pilot
- 60%-65% of engagement now on WhatsApp rather than over the phone
- Outdated information and broken links on the AUA website discovered and fixed
- 2 staff added to admissions support (in place of more admissions counselors)
The Challenge
AUA's admissions team gets 9,000 to 10,000 inquiries a month. The team has twelve admissions counselors on staff to reach out to all of those leads, which they do by making 200-300 calls a day each. As you might expect, a lot of those calls go unanswered (and a lot of telephone tag ensues). What it means is the team spends a lot of time dialing, and only a fraction of the day advising.
Part of the reason the calls don’t connect is that AUA’s student base overwhelmingly prefers to engage over text (Druid’s 2026 AI Benchmark Report shows a deep preference for texting amongst higher ed clients). AUA already had a chatbot, but all it could do was answer simple questions; it couldn’t do anything with what it learned, couldn’t move a student to the next step, and couldn’t hand anyone off.
Sheikh Sadiq, EVP of Strategy and COO at AUA, met with a number of AI vendors before he found Druid. Watch the clip below to hear in his own words how he brought the President of AUA on board with the initiative.
The Solutions
AUA and Druid put agents into the admissions workflow in stages, starting with the website. The first agent was deployed to replace the existing chatbot, answering questions about requirements, USMLE scores, the leave of absence policy, financial aid and more (pulling directly from AUA’s own content and nothing else). During 4 weeks of pilot testing the teams found leaks and hallucinations, tightened the knowledge boundaries, and retested.
The second agent calls prospective students, works out whether they’re ready to talk to a person, and hot-transfers the ones who are to a live admissions counselor. AUA scaled it deliberately, from 50 calls a day to 100 and then up to 200.
Both agents work through SMS and WhatsApp as well. In fact, between 60% and 65% of the engagement is now occurring on WhatsApp (AUA gets interest from around the world, making this channel extremely popular).
Conversation and activity data logs to Salesforce. In terms of access, Druid holds no student profiles, duplicates nothing that already lives in Salesforce, stores no financial information, and masks PII out of audit logs and transcript conversations.
Results
- 4 weeks from start to chat agent live in pilot
- Calling agent scaled from 50 to 200 calls/day, increasing to 1,000
- 60-65% of engagement on the WhatsApp agent
- Webchat, WhatsApp, SMS and voice all in production for admissions
- Zero custom development. AUA opened APIs and provided data access.
Future Plans
AUA’s president stood up an AI committee and an academic committee for AI advancement, so there’s a roadmap instead of a one-off project.
In testing now: a document collection agent. Sadiq calls document chasing the most time-consuming thing admissions does, and he isn’t wrong: recommendation letters, transcripts, the endless follow-up. This agent should be live between late September and mid October 2026.
Then financial aid, then academics.
On the academic side, the committee is building requirements for student self-assessment inside the LMS. Sadiq’s reasoning is good and specific: a semester is 15 weeks, and finding out in week 4, 5 or 6 that a student is weak in one subject is already too late. He wants students self-assessing and faculty seeing it early.