In an increasingly digitized world, educational institutions are constantly looking for new ways to improve the experience of their students and teachers. The European School of Management and Business (EUDE) is no exception. Headquartered in Madrid, EUDE has a high volume of international students who complete their training online. With more than 13,000 virtual students each year, the school has faced logistical challenges in supporting individuals who are located in different time zones as their tutors. For this reason, EUDE has decided to work with IBM to develop a virtual co-tutor based on generative AI, called EDU.

EDU is a virtual co-tutor that is intended to offer real-time support to both students and tutors who can submit questions to it using natural language. Its main function is to provide immediate answers to administrative and academic questions, as well as support students with logistical questions related to delivery dates and exams. The tool is based on IBM technology including IBM Cloud^®, IBM^® watsonx.ai^™, IBM watsonx^™ Assistant and IBM Watson^® Discovery, which enable natural language dialogue and access to a broad knowledge base. By building the solution on the watsonx platform, EUDE has full control over the content and responses that EDU provides, as well as the security of its sources and its own data.

During the initial pilot, which ran for a week and included three dozen students, all of them taking the Digital Transformation course, EDU demonstrated it would help make an impact on students and tutors. With EDU, students would experience faster response times and a higher level of support, which would increase their satisfaction and engagement with EUDE programs. Indeed, some of the students summarized their experience as “very interesting,” rating the pilot on a scale of 1 (poor) to 10 (excellent) as “9 in prediction accuracy and 8 in test performance,” stating that the processing speed was less than 20 seconds per response and rating the “responsiveness” as “good.” At the same time, EUDE knows it is essential to optimize the experience of tutors by freeing up time for them to focus on personalized tutoring, among other more strategic tasks. Because it was designed to reduce the amount of time tutors need to spend on routine questions, EDU would help them to instead tackle more challenging questions and tasks, which is essential to making the most of their knowledge and skills.

In summary, EDU represents a cutting-edge technology solution that addresses the specific needs of EUDE and reflects the transformative impact that generative AI can have on the higher education sector.