AI-Enabled Advisory Services for Higher Education

www.databricks.com

The Problem

Call centers are a key student support tool for higher education. Advisors for financial aid, admissions, and enrollment are often a student's first point of contact, but monitoring and maintaining conversation quality at scale is expensive and difficult.

Most institutions staff their own call centers and use customer service orchestration tools like Genesys or Five9. The pain point isn't the calls themselves. It's what happens after.

Example 1: Improving advisor quality without scaling costs. A typical QA approach extracts transcriptions from the orchestration software and manually reviews a random sample. Due to call volume, QA teams often evaluate only ~5% of calls per year. Doubling that coverage means doubling the team. At $50K/person for a 10-person team, that's an additional $500K/year for marginal gains. On top of the cost, native transcriptions often misidentify student names, breaking downstream dashboards that need to attach call history to student profiles.

Example 2: Understanding what students are struggling with. Some institutions have no systematic approach. Others maintain complex NLP pipelines to chunk transcripts, extract topics, and score sentiment. These pipelines are brittle at scale, require manual curation of phrase lists between weekly batch runs, and rarely produce insights fast enough for administrators to act on emerging issues before the semester moves on.

Why LLM-Based Transcription Matters

Traditional ASR models trained on clean, narrow datasets struggle with accents, dialects, compressed phone audio, and noisy environments, all standard in student support calls, especially at institutions with large international populations. Foundation models like OpenAI Whisper, trained on 680,000+ hours of diverse multilingual audio, generalize far better across these conditions. Older ASR is not obsolete, but for this use case, it's the wrong tool.

The AI Approach on Databricks

We've seen several higher education institutions solve both problems by partnering with Databricks. Baylor University is one example: the workflow presented here is a refined version of the one Baylor used to tackle these same challenges. The core pattern starts with deploying OpenAI Whisper on Databricks Model Serving for higher-fidelity transcriptions, then layering AI Functions for enrichment and scoring.

For Example 1 (Advisor Quality):

Host WhisperAI as a managed serving endpoint; apply transcriptions at scale via ai_query() in daily or weekly batches.
Use LLM-as-a-judge to score each transcript against the institutional QA rubric. The model evaluates every rubric criterion, returning a weighted 1–5 overall score, per-criterion scores, and a narrative assessment. Rubric criteria are pulled from a reference table and codified in the prompt, ensuring the same standard is applied consistently across every call.
Route calls flagged for improvement to the QA team, replacing random sampling with targeted review.

For Example 2 (Student Insights):

Same Whisper transcription pipeline, applied quarterly to hours of audio.
Enrich each call with ai_analyze_sentiment() and ai_extract() for sentiment, topics, and intent.
Expose results through two complementary surfaces: an Agent Bricks Knowledge Assistant for unstructured reasoning over raw transcripts ("What are students commonly struggling with in financial aid?") with grounded citations, and a Genie Space for structured trend queries ("Average sentiment by category this quarter?").

What makes this powerful on Databricks is that every step (ingestion, transcription, AI analysis, and discovery) runs on a single governed platform. Unity Catalog keeps sensitive student data secure with fine-grained access controls. AI Functions like ai_query() call foundation models directly from SQL without a separate inference infrastructure. No stitching tools together, no data leaving the governance boundary, no separate orchestration layer.

Architecture

This solution converts unstructured audio from cloud object storage into high-fidelity structured data through a governed pipeline:

Stage	Component	Purpose
Ingest	Auto Loader & Volumes	Syncs cloud storage audio to a governed Delta table
Transcribe	OpenAI Whisper	Converts unstructured audio to high-fidelity text. Hosted on Model Serving; swappable with NVIDIA Canary, Distil-Whisper, or other Hugging Face ASR models
Enrich	AI Functions + UC SQL Functions	Sentiment, topics, intent, call category, and LLM-as-a-judge rubric scoring — each wrapped as a governed Unity Catalog SQL function
Orchestrate	LangGraph + Claude on Model Serving	Reasoning agent chaining UC SQL functions as tools. Deployed as a managed serving endpoint, accessible from AI Playground or REST API
Reason	Agent Bricks Knowledge Assistant	Chats over unstructured call transcripts with grounded citations to specific calls
Discovery	Genie Space	Natural-language SQL interface over structured call metadata

Raw audio lands in Databricks Volumes under Unity Catalog. Whisper performs distributed speech-to-text, capturing nuances like student names and higher-education terminology that native transcriptions miss. AI Functions then enrich each record with sentiment, topics, and rubric scores. These are synthesized with institutional records (such as student data from Salesforce), providing a 360-degree view of every interaction.

Getting Started

To run the solution, update the catalog/schema widget values and ensure a SQL warehouse is available (AI Functions use ai_query(), which executes on serverless SQL compute). Attach compute to a single-user cluster (DBR 15.4 LTS+) or serverless environment.

For Whisper, the easiest path is Databricks Marketplace: install a Whisper model (e.g., whisper-large-v3) from the marketplace into your catalog and deploy it as a serving endpoint with a GPU tier matched to your throughput needs. The agent's LLM endpoints (Claude, Llama) are Foundation Model API endpoints available by default; all endpoint names are configurable via widget parameters.

The setup stage creates the schema, Delta tables, advisor rubric, and registers all 12 SQL functions. Deployment ingests audio metadata via the Auto Loader, packages the LangGraph agent with MLflow, and deploys it as a model-serving endpoint (~15 minutes). A test suite of 40+ end-to-end tests validates everything from table schemas to live endpoint tool invocation.

Once deployed, interact with the agent in the AI Playground: select the endpoint and ask questions in natural language. The Playground also supports a prototype-first path: attach UC SQL functions as tools to any Foundation Model, iterate on the system prompt, and export the working configuration as a Python/MLflow notebook.

Two natural-language surfaces sit on top: a Genie Space for structured questions ("What's the average rubric score by call category?") and an Agent Bricks Knowledge Assistant for reasoning over unstructured transcripts ("What are students commonly struggling with in financial aid?") with grounded citations. Together, they let non-technical advisors, mentors, and QA managers inquire about their students without reaching out to a data SME. To learn more: Genie Spaces (AWS | Azure | GCP) and Agent Bricks Knowledge Assistant (AWS | Azure | GCP).

Ready to explore this in your own environment? Download the solution from GitHub to see how advisor call recordings can be ingested, transcribed, analyzed, and explored end-to-end. To go further, learn more about Databricks AI for generative AI workflows, Unity Catalog for secure governance, and Genie for conversational analytics. For additional guidance, explore Solution Accelerators, product documentation, or connect with Databricks to discuss how these capabilities can support student service operations at your institution.