Far too often, registering for classes is considerably more—let’s say exciting—than it needs to be.  

Registration should be simple, but as many students have discovered

How Can AI Help? 

Although training an AI on the course catalog is one possible solution, it’s not a very good. Course catalogs change often enough that keeping the AI up to date would be difficult at best and maddening at worst. The potential for bizarre or hallucinatory answers is high. 

However, with the proper combination of advanced search and AI infrastructure software, you can use AI to search the course catalog and discuss the results. While AI won’t replace a human advisor, it can help with routine tasks, freeing up time for students and advisors to make more productive use of their limited time together. 

Why Use AI Infrastructure Software? 

The challenge of using AI is that an AI Large Language Model (LLM) only appears to be easy to use. While we can talk to it and get an answer that usually seems pretty intelligent, the reality is that although the lights are on, nobody is home. An AI LLM is basically a probability engine: it responds by generating the words that it calculates are most likely to fit in with the prompt it was given. While this capability is definitely an amazing achievement, the quality of the achievement cannot hide the fact that an AI has no actual sense of context or knowledge about the world. An AI lacks common sense, and that lack makes prompt design especially crucial. Small changes to the prompt can yield big changes in the output—prompting an AI to program in a natural language.  

AI Infrastructure Software provides a framework for managing AI models—usually, though not exclusively, LLMs. It manages communication with the AI models, automatically enhancing prompts and facilitating interaction with the AI.  

Infrastructure software brings AI to the data, sharply decreasing data movement and avoiding potential security risks. It enables you to distribute processing so that your systems are not overwhelmed by spikes in demand and enables you to scale AI initiatives. In addition, AI infrastructure software provides: 

• Ability to connect to multiple AI models 

• AI-enhanced natural language search capabilities 

• Enhanced prompt engineering 

• Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) 

• Context aware relevancy ranking 

• Personalized advice from your AI 

AI infrastructure software reduces errors and hallucinations, dramatically improving the quality of your results compared to interacting directly with an AI. 

How Does This Help with a Course Catalogue?

AI infrastructure software provides powerful enhanced search capabilities. Traditionally, the major problem with a lot of search tools is that either the query is so narrow that it doesn’t find what you want, or it returns so much information that it takes a long time to wade through all the irrelevant results. By combining RAG with the AI-enhanced search capabilities of infrastructure software, that large pile of results can be sorted by relevancy to the original query. Should the query be too narrow, the infrastructure software can recognize that and suggest improvements to the search.  

The benefits go far beyond search though. AI infrastructure software enhances the ability of AI to help with all aspects of course selection: finding the right courses, figuring out which sections fit your schedule, identifying pre-requisites, and so forth. AI infrastructure software lets you discuss course selection with the AI—or with multiple AI LLMs simultaneously, a virtual council of advisors. The virtual advisors help students identify the topics and questions they should discuss with their flesh and blood advisor. Since advisor time is always limited, using AI to focus in on key areas is a brilliant, and invaluable, application of exactly what AI is good for. 

Infrastructure Leads to Better Conversations 

Searching through a college course catalog is often frustrating and tedious. AI infrastructure software changes that. 

By improving communications with AI and doing the heavy lifting around prompt engineering, AI infrastructure software simplifies finding the right courses quickly and provides a means for students to tap into AI advice. Routine questions can be answered before the student meets with their advisor, giving student and advisor more time to focus on important issues. Better conversations with AI mean better conversations between students and advisors. 

AI infrastructure software sharply increases the usefulness and value of AI and thereby magnifies the value of everyone’s time. 

To become a leader in using AI infrastructure software or to find out more about it, contact SWIRL today.