Prospective students, parents, and counselors have thousands of questions, but most institutions answer them with overloaded call centers, overflowing inboxes, and hard‑to‑find web content. Meanwhile, “AI” often sounds like a multi‑year, high‑risk project that requires new tools, new teams, or a full site redesign. It doesn’t have to be that way.​

This session shows how higher‑ed teams can deploy focused AI assistants on top of their existing Cascade CMS sites and tech stack to answer common admissions and student‑services questions 24/7, reduce call volume, and nudge more visitors toward starting—and finishing—applications. The emphasis is on using content you already have (program pages, FAQs, deadlines, policies) and light‑touch integrations, so most institutions can move from idea to live pilot in less than a month.​

We will walk through a step‑by‑step approach: choosing the right use cases (admissions, financial aid, program discovery), curating and structuring content for AI, defining guardrails and escalation paths, and embedding assistants in your current site and channels without changing your CMS or core systems. Along the way, we will highlight real metrics institutions can track—fewer routine calls, faster answers, improved self‑service, and higher completion rates for key conversion steps. Attendees will leave with a practical blueprint they can adapt immediately for their own site