Originally published by Advancing Admissions.
AI has accelerated our thirst for information while shrinking our patience for getting it. We love using AI to research, compare, and make decisions. But something interesting happens when we find ourselves on the receiving end of an AI driven process. Suddenly, we are not quite as enthusiastic.
This is especially true for major purchases, where trust, emotion, and human connection influence our decisions.
The fundamentals of why people buy have not changed. We buy emotionally and justify logically. AI does a great job helping with the latter. But the former? That still requires human connection.
As AI becomes embedded in nearly every industry, leaders face an important question: What should we automate, and what must remain human?
I wrestled with this question a few years ago as AI began making its way into enrollment management. Like many leaders, I saw big opportunities to improve efficiency, accelerate response times, and do more with less.
Lots of mistakes were made.
In my pursuit of efficiency, I automated too much and removed too much of the human element from our early recruitment processes. We became better at processing prospective students, but not necessarily better at building relationships with them.
That experience forced a hard reset in how I approached automation.
Just because something can be automated does not mean it should be.
I also learned that not all friction is bad. Some friction creates opportunities for meaningful conversations, reinforces commitment, and helps students make informed decisions. Remove too much, and you risk inflating your applicant pool while enrollment yield declines.
More applications looks impressive on a dashboard, but only enrolled students pay tuition.
Start by Becoming Your Own Prospective Student
Before deciding what to automate, experience your institution through the eyes of a student.
Submit inquiry forms and applications that reflect the different personas you serve. See how long it takes to receive a call or personal email. Follow the communication journeys. Are the messages timely and relevant? Are they conversational, or filled with institutional jargon?
More importantly, ask yourself: Are we communicating what students want to hear, or what our institution thinks is important?
I am confident you will be surprised by what you discover.
Once you identify the friction, distinguish between what creates unnecessary work and what creates meaningful engagement. Automate repetitive administrative tasks, routine questions, status updates, and processes that help students move forward without waiting on someone.
The moments that require empathy, reassurance, and persuasion should be saved for humans.
Once complete, test, test, and test again… and when you think you are done, test a little more. Think of your AI agents as new employees. They need proper onboarding, training, and ongoing feedback to become efficient, so be sure to build enough time into the process.
When AI operates independently, it becomes part of your institution’s identity. Every interaction shapes how a prospective student perceives your college. Leaders should be just as concerned about the quality of those interactions as they are about the efficiencies they create.
Speed Matters, but So Does the Signal It Sends
How quickly we respond, and how we choose to respond, communicates how much we value the relationship.
Consider a student who submits an inquiry or application. A personal call that same day signals that their interest matters and that someone is ready to help them take the next step.
An automated email or text might provide the same information, but it does not communicate the same level of investment.
Technology can acknowledge an action, but humans make that action feel important.
In a competitive enrollment environment, this is HUGE.
The Human Sandwich: Human. AI. Human.
Out of these lessons came the Human Sandwich framework. The concept is simple: humans start the relationship, AI keeps momentum going, and humans step in when they can make an impact.
The first human interaction establishes the relationship. Early conversations help us understand a student’s motivations, concerns, and aspirations. This creates a foundation that technology can build upon, rather than attempt to replace.
AI manages the middle through a Next Best Action framework. Instead of pushing every student through the same predetermined communication sequence, AI evaluates student behavior, engagement, and progress to determine what should happen next, when it should happen, and whether AI or a human should deliver it.
The last human element is triggered by the moment, not the enrollment stage. AI recognizes when a conversation, reassurance, or intervention could make a difference and brings the right person into the conversation.
From Funnel Management to Momentum Management
At its core, the Human Sandwich is about momentum management. An object in motion stays in motion, unless something interrupts progress.
Motivation is fleeting, and students experience it at different moments. A student might be excited about college on Monday and overwhelmed by the cost on Wednesday. Our enrollment processes should be equipped to recognize these shifts and respond accordingly.
Consider a student who has been sitting in an admitted status for several weeks. Our traditional response? Send another reminder to “secure your spot” or “complete your next steps.”
What if the student is not ready to move forward because something else is holding them back?
Imagine that same student has opened a financial aid email three times and clicked on the net price calculator. Those signals might suggest the student is concerned about affordability and trying to understand how to pay for college.
The next best action is not another deposit reminder. It might be a conversation with someone who can help the student understand their financial options.
That is momentum management.
This is just one example of hundreds of situations prospective students in your enrollment funnel may be navigating at this very moment.
We often mistake inactivity for a lack of interest when it may be a sign of uncertainty.
Sending a bunch of transactional emails outlining the steps to enroll will accomplish little if we have not addressed what is preventing the student from moving forward.
AI can help us identify those signals at scale while humans can provide the connection and reassurance needed to address them.
Rethinking the Role of AI in Admissions
The real opportunity with AI is not reducing the number of people involved in recruitment. It is allowing our people to spend more time doing what technology cannot: building trust, creating belonging, and helping students make decisions that can change their lives.
For years, we have designed enrollment processes around stages, communication calendars, and institutional deadlines. We tell students what they need to do next and assume that providing the information is enough to move them forward.
Students do not experience college enrollment as a series of CRM stages. They experience it as a series of decisions, questions, obstacles, and moments of uncertainty.
AI gives us an opportunity to redesign that experience around the student rather than the institution.
The question now is whether each interaction is helping a student move closer to a confident decision.
The future of enrollment management depends on our ability to understand why students stall and address the barriers preventing them from moving forward.
As you shop your existing processes, the next challenge is deciding what stays, what gets automated, and what should go away entirely.
Activity Audit Matrix
As you shop your existing processes, take a hard look at how your admissions team spends its time. An Activity Audit Matrix can help identify which activities belong to your counselors, which are better suited for AI, and which may no longer serve a purpose.
We have spent decades building enrollment processes around the limitations of our technology, staffing, and resources. Those limitations are changing, giving us an opportunity to rethink how we engage students, remove friction, and respond to their needs in real time.
Now comes the harder part: challenging the way we have always done things and having the willingness to redesign them.
High relationship · High volume
Human Priority
- First-gen family calls
- Scholarship conversations
- Decision-point check-ins
- Withdrawal risk conversations
High relationship · Low volume
Human + AI
- Campus visit follow-ups
- Scholarship interview prep
- Long-cycle lead nurture conversations
- High-stakes but infrequent
Low relationship · High volume
AI Priority
- Deadline reminders
- Status updates
- FAQ responses
- Application confirmations
- Transcript nudges
- Missing document alerts
- FAFSA reminders
Low relationship · Low volume
Evaluate or Eliminate
- Mass generic outreach with no segmentation
- Activities nobody has questioned in years
- Little evidence of impact
Activity Audit Matrix: a framework for deciding which admissions activities should remain human, be supported by AI, be automated, or be eliminated. Rows show how much the activity depends on trust, judgment, and empathy. Columns show how often it happens.
AI Gave Your Team Time Back. Now What?
One of the harder lessons I learned early in our AI journey was that automating work created an unexpected challenge. Activities that once consumed a large portion of our staff’s day were suddenly being handled by AI, leaving gaps in routines and workflows that had been established over years.
Here is where institutions need to be intentional. Without redefining expectations, responsibilities, and performance measures, the return on that investment can quickly disappear. People naturally gravitate toward what they know, and simply giving staff more time does not guarantee that time will be spent on activities that produce better results.
AI creates leverage, but realizing its value requires us to rethink the roles of the people whose work it replaces. That means redirecting their capacity toward higher value activities such as expanding recruitment territories, developing relationships, having meaningful conversion conversations, addressing objections, and helping students overcome barriers to enrollment.
Our KPIs need to evolve alongside those responsibilities. Instead of emphasizing the number of calls made, emails sent, or follow-ups completed, we should place greater weight on meaningful student engagement, conversion rates, territory growth, application and enrollment yield, and the successful resolution of barriers that prevent students from moving forward.
