What a campus AI assistant costs — and one that is already running.

Universities answer the same few hundred questions tens of thousands of times a year, mostly at night, mostly from students who will otherwise email an office that is closed. It is close to a perfect AI workflow — and unlike most vertical claims, this one we can point at something running.

A live example: Rockets AI at the University of Toledo

We built Rockets AI with the University of Toledo. It answers student questions from the University's own pages, with a citation on every answer so the student can check the source themselves, across 25 shipped capabilities. It is on our homepage — you can open it and try to break it, which is a more useful exercise than reading a case study PDF.

The design decision that matters most: it answers from the institution's own published material and cites it. An assistant that invents a registration deadline is worse than no assistant, because a confident wrong answer travels.

What FERPA requires

• Student records are protected data. Deploy in your environment, least privilege, full logging, data processing agreement before any record is touched.
• Explainability. Accreditors and auditors ask why a decision was made. Each action needs to record the input, the rule, the output and the reviewer.
• Human sign-off on admission, aid and academic-standing decisions, by design.
• Academic integrity as a setting. Tutors configured to teach the method rather than complete the assessment, with sessions logged so faculty can see how the cohort actually uses them.

What it costs

A departmental assistant — a single college unit, answering from that unit's own published material — is a fixed-price build at $3,500. An institution-wide deployment touching student records, with SSO and integration into the registrar's systems, is a larger engagement priced against scope. Transfer-credit evaluation and financial-aid verification are agent workflows rather than chat, and are scoped separately.

Where to start if the budget is small

One department, one term, the questions that office answers most. Measure the reduction in repeat enquiries against staff hours. That single number is what funds the institutional rollout, and it is far easier to obtain than a committee's permission to attempt everything at once.