The handbook, answerable at 2am.

• 01

  Policy and administrative answers

  Attendance, extensions, fees and grading answered from the current handbook with the section cited, at the hours students actually ask.

• 02

  Course material Q&A

  Scoped to a module's own readings and lectures, so answers reflect what was taught rather than the internet's average view of the topic.

• 03

  Programme and eligibility guidance

  Prospective students get accurate entry-requirement answers with the source, instead of a prospectus PDF and a contact form.

• 01

  Academic help is Socratic by design

  For coursework, the system asks and hints rather than answering, and hands off to a human when a student is genuinely stuck. Building the answer-machine version is easy and actively harmful to the institution buying it.

• 02

  Minors change the data rules

  Under-18 cohorts bring stricter consent, retention and moderation obligations under DPDP, GDPR and COPPA-equivalent regimes. That shapes the architecture, not just the privacy notice.

• 03

  An educator reviews anything assessed

  Generated assessment content and feedback drafts go to an educator before a student sees them. Grading with consequences stays human.

1. 1

   Data inventory

   What docs / databases / APIs / feeds matter? What's PII vs public? What changes daily vs quarterly? We map it before writing code.

2. 2

   Retrieval architecture

   Hybrid (BM25 + vector) retrieval, chunking strategy, reranking, citations. Tuned for your domain not a generic benchmark.

3. 3

   Eval suite

   Real-world question set with golden answers. Faithfulness, context precision, latency. So you know when changes ship a regression.

4. 4

   Guardrails

   Prompt-injection defense, PII scrubbing, refusal patterns, output schemas. Especially critical for customer-facing deployments.

5. 5

   Production + iterate

   Cost-effective inference (caching, fallback models), monitoring, weekly eval reports. Fine-tune when the data justifies it.

• Moodle & Canvas
• Google Classroom
• Student information systems
• Salesforce Education Cloud
• Twilio & WhatsApp Business
• Zoom & Google Meet
• Payment gateways for fee collection

FAQ

RAG for course material and student support: your questions.

• How do we stop it answering assessment questions?

  Assessment content is excluded from the index, and coursework-shaped queries route to the Socratic mode rather than the retrieval answer. Both behaviours are scored in the eval suite so a model change can't quietly relax them.

• Our policies change every year. How do we keep it current?

  Version-aware indexing keyed to the academic year, with the cohort's year as a retrieval filter — a returning student's rules and a fresher's are not the same document.

• Should I use RAG or fine-tuning?

  RAG for facts that change. Fine-tuning for style, format, or domain reasoning. Most production systems use both — and we'll tell you which mix is right after a 1-week discovery.

• Can I use my own LLM (open-weights)?

  Yes. We work with Llama, Mistral, Qwen, and similar — useful for data residency, cost predictability, and air-gapped environments.

• AI agents for admissions and student servicesAgents that qualify applicants, chase documents, answer eligibility questions and book counselling calls across WhatsApp, voice and email.Read
• EdTech prototype to productionAuth, roles, data protection for minors, and load behaviour added to an edtech prototype before an institution's procurement team asks about any of it.Read

• RAG for banking and financial servicesRetrieval over circulars, product terms and internal procedure — returning the clause, the revision date, and a link to the page it came from.Read
• RAG for healthcare and clinical documentsRetrieval over clinical guidelines, payer policy and internal SOPs — with the citation, the version, and an explicit refusal when the library doesn't cover the question.Read
• AI product search and catalogue RAGSemantic search and grounded product Q&A over your catalogue, reviews and size guides — with stock and price read live rather than remembered.Read