NYU’s Virtual Assistant Strategy to Catch Early Warning Signals and Scale Support
Admissions offices everywhere are being asked to do more with the same resources. NYU is one of them, handling 5x the application volume it did in 2008, with the exact same size team, across campuses in New York, Shanghai, and Abu Dhabi. The difference is what they’ve built to support that growth: an AI virtual assistant that answered over 55,000 questions last year, with 96% resolved without a single call or email.
In this session, Kellie Fitzgerald, Senior Director of Operations for Undergraduate Admissions at NYU, shares how her team built a virtual assistant strategy that scaled with a growing, increasingly global applicant pool without growing headcount. We’ll cover what worked, what didn’t, and the data insights her team didn’t expect to get out of it.
You’ll walk away with:
- A real-world model for supporting a global, always-on applicant pool without adding staff
- How to turn conversation data into an early-warning system for confusion, interest spikes, and emerging questions your team hasn’t seen coming
- Lessons from NYU’s rollout (including what they’d do differently) on getting buy-in, staffing live chat, and expanding beyond admissions
Kellie Fitzgerald
Director of Operations for Undergraduate Admissions
Kelly Workman-Flood
Customer Success Manager
