Empowering University-level Help Desk for International Applicants with AI Chatbots

In this paper, we present the design, development, and testing of AI chatbots to support the help desk service provided by the Recruitment and Admissions Unit at Politecnico di Torino, a technical university located in the north-west of Italy. We explore the use of data-driven, AI-based conversational agents providing targeted responses to applicants’ queries based on both the past student-office interactions through a ticketing system and a collection of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs). With an ever-increasing number of requests from international applicants (20k+ requests from 100+ countries since January 2024), the adoption of AI-based solutions allows a significant reduction of the average waiting time per request, fostering the application, enrollment, and integration of foreign students coming from a variety of different countries. We develop separate chatbot systems to handle FAQs and manage inquiries submitted through the university’s ticketing system. We explore the use of intent-based and generative approaches as well as a combination of the two. Our findings indicate that the intent-based approach excels in handling FAQs and well-defined tickets, whereas the generative-only strategy is more suitable for open-ended requests.