The Help Desk Crunch: How AI Is Changing Student Support During Peak Demand
Last year, campus IT teams fielded 4.2 million help desk support tickets, according to a survey by Clovity. The survey found that about 42% of those requests were handled by self-service deflection and automation, with the top deflected requests including password resets, software installation guides and account access instructions.
At Brandeis University, call volume to the voicebot matched or slightly exceeded last year’s average call volume, while the need for human technicians dropped by more than half, says Steve Knowles, executive director of ITS Client Services and Engagement.
“By letting the voice and chat assistants handle routine questions, our technicians can focus more on interpersonal skills during customer interactions, as well as complex problem-solving and high-touch support,” Knowles says.
Brandeis University announced a new AI-powered voice and chat assistant this month that allows for voicebot and chatbot help around the clock, citing VPN support, learning management system navigation, multifactor authentication troubleshooting and more among frequently asked technical questions.
“Our main focus was simply delivering a modern campus experience, giving everyone instant, round-the-clock access to answers on their own schedule,” Knowles says. “It wasn’t a reactive fix for ticket surges or staffing challenges, but the operational benefits have been a huge win.”
The university rolled out the launch in phases, beginning with a soft launch of the chat assistant to faculty and staff in July. It then added the voice assistant in August; the rollout for students occurred during move-in week at the end of August.
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How RAG-Based Voice AI Is Changing Student Support
While some universities have employed pop-up desks, extended hours and student-staffed help desk programs to manage the influx of tickets, others are turning to retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for voice AI. The approach minimizes hallucinated or fake IT troubleshooting steps that some large language models can produce.
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RAG-based voice AI instead allows voice agents to pull accurate answers from enterprise knowledge bases to answer queries faster. Some universities are also using text-based digital chats or omnichannel systems with an underlying RAG framework that includes voice as an optional modality.
This solution is especially helpful for institutions that experience seasonal volume spikes (such as move-in week), as it automates student and faculty assistance while navigating often disconnected university systems.
“A big part of what client service centers do is anxiety remediation. If someone has an issue that they sit on for an extended time, the anxiety builds,” Knowles says. “Then, you are no longer just helping to fix a technology issue, you are also calming the anxious and sometimes angry emotions that arise when your technology isn’t doing what it is supposed to.”
The build, which took more than eight months, was anchored by a three-month knowledge base revamp that Knowles describes as the most important and underestimated component of the entire project. “Support documentation is everything,” he says. “These agents thrive on the data you feed them.”
READ MORE: Universities are prioritizing AI-generated voice clone deepfakes.
What Relying on AI Agents Really Looks Like for Student Services
When determining how to invest in help desk solutions, start with basic efficiencies; for example, is there a way to speed up the process for accomplishing your goal?
“You want to reverse-engineer problems you can solve and discover ways to save time or revenue, and then work your way back,” says Fred Sessoms, an enterprise architect at CDW. “If it's not saving time and money, then what is it used for? For example, look for low-hanging fruit, such as password resets at a university. University IT teams should never have to do a password reset. That should be answered by an agent.”
The University of Michigan stood up Go Blue: Mobile AI, a proprietary secure mobile app built on a RAG architecture that references internal university databases and IT documentation and offers voice capabilities.
Those intuitive approaches align with the digital experiences that today’s college students are accustomed to. In a 2025 Student Digital Experience Survey by Pathify, about 60% of students reported losing significant time searching for basic information, and 95% said that they would be likely to use a unified digital platform if their institution had one.
Six weeks into deployment at Brandeis, the chat assistant is currently hitting a 36% containment rate, while the voice assistant is at 32%. Both figures fall within the institution’s launch goal of 30% to 50% containment within the first six months.
The top deflected ticket categories include account login and password resets, email access and configuration, wireless network connectivity, VPN access issues and software installation and licensing — the same high-volume, low-complexity requests that Sessoms describes as the canonical AI use case.
