Salesforce Education Cloud Gets Higher Ed AI Tools
CRM giant Salesforce recently unveiled new features coming to its Education Cloud platform aimed at streamlining common tasks for educators and students.
The new features run the gamut from the student-centric (for example, one feature is designed to help students stay on track with their degree requirements) to admin-focused (like a new capability that would standardize the entirety of an institution's student data corpus).
The following AI capabilities will become generally available in June:
- Intelligent Degree Planning, a roadmap-style feature that keeps track of individual students' progress toward their degrees.
- Skills Generator, a curriculum-planning feature designed to help teachers build more valuable courses. "Using AI," said Salesforce, "[this] tool analyzes program and course information to identify market-relevant skills students will gain, and then generates a list that can be added to coursework descriptions, making it simple for advisors and students to see what classes to take to gain specific skills and how those skills can be showcased on resumes."
- Intelligent Question Generator, which uses AI to create more incisive student questionnaires for scenarios like career services help, study abroad guides and academic advising.
The below features will arrive sometime in October:
- Pathway Templates, a feature that works similarly to the Intelligent Degree Planning feature mentioned above. Pathway Templates are meant to be used by academic advisors to create course guides for students based on their degree and time to graduate.
- Einstein Mentorship Summaries, which helps schools pair students with mentors using AI.
- Einstein Copilot Recruitment & Admissions Actions, a natural-language AI chat assistant that helps school staff field questions from prospective students. The AI model powering this feature is "grounded in previous student interactions, knowledge articles, events, and other institutional data," per Salesforce.
- Data Cloud for Education, an education-specific platform that works with Education Cloud to act as repository for an institution's entire data estate, regardless of where each particular dataset was orignally generated. By removing these silos, organizations can get more comprehensive insights into their data. It also prepares their data to be used by AI models.
Salesforce positions the new features as a way to help alleviate teacher burnout and increase students' career prospects.
"With industry-specific AI and data tools, Education Cloud will help K-12 and higher ed institutions provide more individualized support for every student while increasing efficiency and helping to reduce staff burnout," said Salesforce Vice President Bala Subramanian in a prepared statement. "This will free educators and staff to focus on improving student outcomes like career readiness, well-being, and graduation rates."
For more information, visit the Salesforce site.