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Enterprise App StoreAI is promising to flip the script in the education sector by unlocking unprecedented productivity gains.
ANZ tertiary institutions have never been under more pressure. With finite resources, they’re being asked to grow their enrolments, lift student outcomes and maintain resilient operations. Unfortunately, administrative friction quietly works against them achieving these objectives.
The new research report commissioned by TechnologyOne and independently researched by Forrester, Reshaping Student Success Through AI In ANZ Tertiary Education, illustrates how widespread the challenge has become. The study surveyed more than 300 education leaders across Australia and New Zealand and found that routine administrative tasks consume staff capacity at 58 per cent of institutions. Behind that figure sits thousands of hours trapped in manual workflows and reactive problem solving.
Conversely, more than half of educations leaders surveyed now expect AI embedded in their ERP to lift administrative productivity by upwards of 60 per cent.
If a productivity improvement like that is genuinely on the table, where should the reclaimed hours go? And how exactly can new technology unlock this level of transformational AI?
Student support and experience are top priorities
Survey responses reveal four processes where institutions are successfully putting AI to work:
- Predicting student disengagement and progression risks
- Resolving student self-service enquiries
- Generating real-time reporting
- Optimising timetabling and room scheduling
Each of these is a high volume, repetitive daily task that is directly visible to students. They are processes that set the rhythm of campus life.
Productivity gains in these areas would be timely for the higher education sector. In the most recent national Student Experience Survey, it was revealed undergraduate ratings for student support and services have declined since 2019, with the latest results the lowest in almost a decade.
Self-service enquiries run at enormous volumes, so even small improvements would show up quickly as shorter queues and fresher information for decision makers.
Improving outcomes for at-risk students
Increased capacity is only valuable when it can improve outcomes for all students. Almost two-thirds of education leaders said they expect AI embedded in their ERP to speed up the identification of at-risk students by more than 60 per cent.
Earlier signals mean earlier support. These are the moments where intervention has the greatest chance of improving outcomes for individual students. Reaching a struggling student weeks sooner can be the difference between quiet disengagement and graduation.
For Australian providers, earlier identification is now a regulatory expectation as well as good practice. The Support for Students Policy requirements, introduced through the Universities Accord reforms, ask every provider to show how it identifies students at risk of not completing their units and what support follows. Embedded AI offers a practical way to meet that obligation at scale.
TechnologyOne Executive Vice President for Education, Mark Jones, says the shift in focus is already underway across the sector.
“When institutions can integrate AI into their ERP, they give front-line staff the time and the insight to step in at exactly the moment a student needs help.”
Maintaining student engagement in the age of AI
Practical strategies for maintaining student engagement in the age of AI, including assessment design, early alerts & AI-aware academic integrity support
Learn moreLimited visibility restricts student support
Institutions aren’t always able to provide students with the optimal level of support when the relevant information lives across disconnected systems. According to education leaders, limited real-time visibility currently restricts proactive, personalised support at 45 per cent of institutions.
Fragmented systems force staff to manually piece each student’s journey together, eating into small productivity gains from ad-hoc AI deployments. AI bolted onto these isolated tools only work around the edges, and results that start at the edges tend to stay small.
Connected systems change the arithmetic by drawing on the same information across admissions, enrolments and student support. The unnecessary reconciliation work disappears when staff can see one student rather than five separate records.
AI embedded within modern enterprise resource planning (ERP) software draws on connected data and works inside everyday workflows. Unsurprisingly, 83 per cent of education decision-makers expect significant improvements in proactive support for at-risk students from ERP transformation.
From his experience with institutions, Mark Jones sees visibility, more than raw capability, as the new differentiator.
“The institutions seeing the biggest productivity gains aren’t necessarily doing more with AI. They’re doing it with better visibility, so the system reacts to what’s happening today rather than what happened last week.”
The new frontrunners in student experience
Education leaders increasingly expect AI to lift administrative productivity, and the expected margin is striking. The harder questions now belong to institutional leaders. Where should the reclaimed capacity go? How quickly can the platform underneath deliver it?
Institutions with connected, real-time data across admissions, enrolment and student support are positioned to capture the gains quickly, particularly across all four processes outlined above. Institutions working through fragmented systems will see the same gains arrive slowly and unevenly, one use case at a time.
Every institution is shaped by its own mix of pressures, priorities and student cohorts. Those that treat their newfound productivity as a strategic asset, and build the scalable foundations required, will set the pace for student experience across ANZ.
Download the full Forrester report, Reshaping Student Success Through AI In ANZ Tertiary Education, to explore the findings in more detail.
Our approach to AI: intelligence with responsibility
Trusted by over 60 per cent of higher education in Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, TechnologyOne has spent nearly four decades building software for the sector and local communities.
That experience shapes everything we build.
Our AI follows the same principle: AI provides the intelligence, people provide the ethics and empathy. This is verified through our certification under ISO 42001, the global standard for AI management systems, and extended through Plus and Guide, which brings that same trusted intelligence directly to students and staff.
See it in action
TechnologyOne's AI capabilities are available today across our enterprise software, with no additional setup or configuration needed for existing customers.
If you'd like to see how Plus or Guide for students can work for you, book a demo with our team today.
Frequently asked questions (FAQs): Plus & AI
Need more information? Read some of our most frequently asked questions about AI, Plus, and more below.
Plus is TechnologyOne’s new agentic AI product, purpose-built for customers on TechnologyOne’s SaaS ERP. It represents the next evolution of enterprise software — an AI that doesn’t just provide answers but takes action on behalf of the user.
Plus stands for Predict, Learn, Uncover, Simplify. It combines advanced reasoning with TechnologyOne’s SaaS+ workflows to interpret intent, anticipate needs, and deliver outcomes in a single interaction. Whether accessed through text or voice, Plus transforms how people work by connecting enterprise-wide data and managing tasks automatically.
Agentic AI refers to AI systems that operate autonomously to achieve specific goals with minimal human supervision. These systems can plan, make decisions, use tools, and adapt their behaviour over time, unlike traditional AI that simply responds to inputs or follows predetermined rules.
Guide is an extension of Plus, designed for the people your organisation serves. It gives residents and students a simple, conversational way to access services, find information, and complete tasks on any device, at any time, without navigating complex systems or portals.
Guide is available in two forms: Guide for residents, for local government communities, and Guide for students, for higher education institutions. Both connect directly to your TechnologyOne ERP to deliver fast, personalised, and trusted responses through natural language conversations.
Plus is designed for your staff. It helps teams work more efficiently by connecting enterprise-wide data, surfacing insights, and completing tasks through natural language, all within your TechnologyOne ERP.
Guide is designed for the people your organisation serves. It gives residents and students a simple way to access services and find information through conversational interactions, without needing to understand and navigate your internal systems.
In short: Plus helps you help your community. Guide helps your community directly.