Becoming an Agentic Institution | Education Keynote, Dreamforce 2026

Please welcome EVP State and Local Government and Education, Salesforce, Tommy Fearne.

Hi and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to this year's Education Keynote here in San Francisco. First of all, on behalf of Salesforce, On behalf of my organization, we're very grateful, and I want to personally thank each and every one of you for being here and spending time. It's a special week for each and every one of us, and I think we get to spend a lot of quality time, discuss a lot of business, and actually get to know each other better. A little bit about my background. I think some of you've heard me speak of this before, but I come from a background of educators. In government. Why do you care? Because I think it's important that you really know and understand that throughout my childhood up until today, my father and his twin brother are still alive, thankfully. One's retired superintendent of schools and one's retired federal government. And then my grandfather was House of Representatives elected. Again, why does that matter? As a leader, I understand what you go through at a high level, obviously not at a detailed level. You know, I have a lot of empathy and a lot of gratefulness for what you do, how you give back, and for the hard work you do. So I think we should give— you all should give each other a big hand of applause for what you do and for being here. So again, thank you, thank you, thank you. We've got a really packed agenda today. I'm really excited because what makes it exciting is we are going to connect all the dots throughout the week, right? And you're like, well, gosh, there was a lot of dots, Tommy. But what I'm hoping you'll leave with is one consistent message, right? One message. So we're going to connect the dots. Right? We're going to show you some cool innovations and products in action. And you're going to hear from 2 of my friends and colleagues, customers, Penn State and DePaul University, which I'm really excited about. I always think it's good when you hear— let's give them a hand. Because I think it's always awesome when you hear from your own folks. You don't want to hear from me, right? Even though I'm sure you love the Southern accent, right? Everybody loves that. Okay, so basically, where are we today? I could tell you, I've spent a lot of time with each and every one of you, and for those that I haven't, I want to spend time. We are all going through a huge paradigm shift, right? Does anyone disagree with that? Let me know. But I know we are. And what I'm hearing from you is the learners— first time I've heard this in years, right? The learners are pushing. They are the ones that are born with technology in their hands. I was born with an encyclopedia in my hand. Big difference, right? So learners, your need for agility, your need for speed, efficiency, imagine that. But how do you do it? You're under immense pressure. When do you do it? How fast do you do it? These are questions that each of you all have given me all week long. Is, Tommy, where the heck do we go, right? What are the next steps? And in today's education landscape, you are an industry of industry— industries. But rest assured, we clearly understand our Agentic Enterprise and products and agents are designed with focus and you in mind across your entire campus. And we're going to connect these dots. We're going to continue. Throughout this next 1 hour trying to pull all this together. And I want you to leave fired up, motivated, inspired, and ready to go back and conquer the world and make the learner a better learner. Again, thank you all very much for this. I want to fire this team up because the next person coming up is a good friend and colleague of mine, and she's going to take this thing to the next level. Kelly Kitchen, let's go.

Thank you, Tommy, and thank you to each of you for being here. This is my 15th Dreamforce. I was gonna make a joke about being a teenager, and then I talked to someone in the education community and they said, maybe you should make a joke about tenure. I decided I'm not very good at telling jokes, so I should just stay focused on the job at hand, which is anchoring us in a shared vision for today. We want to think about becoming an agentic university built on a strong foundation of data so that your staff and AI can work together to enhance that constituent experiences, improve efficiencies, and adapt and thrive no matter what comes next. And we think about that, we think about 4 success levers. We think about how you unify your data in a secure and trusted way. We think about how you connect your workflows and processes that you deliver on every single day. And most of all, we think about transforming your experiences because your constituents want personalized proactive support. And that's not just the learner experience. That extends to your staff, your fans, your alumni, your researchers. Every constituent has that expectation of you. And last, how do you— how well are you engaging at scale? Are you building lifelong relationships that foster a sense of belonging, connection, and engagement? But here's the hard part, and it's the reality that so many of you face. When your data and workflows are in separate systems, student experiences are disconnected. The administrative burdens rise, and security risks multiply. Bringing those together is how you change this. That is the disconnected platform. In that platform, that disconnection is simply not going to work. A separate system over here, a standalone tool over here with AI bolted on. What you need is a single platform that connects every system and every touchpoint. Only Salesforce. It's where we come in. Only Salesforce gives you that single platform where your data, apps, AI, students, staff can all work together in a single platform. This is the playbook for the agentic institution. This is how you will connect your campus across the learner lifecycle, across athletics, across campus operations, and so much more. And if there's one thing we want you to take away from today, is that true transformation in this AI era is dependent upon the 4 layers that you see here. You've just heard me say it multiple times about unifying your data in a secure and governed way. That's the foundation. And it's the application layer. It's the very CRM that Salesforce has been building with you for years. It's where your business logic, your policy rules, those complex institutional workflows exist. and live. When AI is grounded in trusted data and powered by business logic, that's delivering on the vision of the agentic institution, and it allows your staff, students, and AI to react— to act in a safe and compliant way. And then of course, here at Dreamforce, the big announcement of AI Force. You're gonna hear more about how that works in your environments today, but it's our deeply connected architecture that makes your data, your AI, and your workflows available to you wherever you work. Now, the institutions that are gonna be leading a decade from now aren't standing still. In fact, they're innovating with intention and with purpose and trust at the center. Would you like to hear from one of those today? Please join me then in giving a big, warm Dreamforce welcome to the CIO of Pennsylvania State University, David Horton. Thank you, David. David, I'm personally disappointed that you and I did not get to wear our cowboy boots and hats today.

I am too, and I saw a few in the crowd, and I— or not here today, but I saw some cowboy hats walking around.

We missed out. Yeah, we really missed out. We got to work on that. But during our many conversations, David, over getting to know you over the past few years, you talk a lot about Penn State being not just a university but a multi- Could you share more about that with us?

Sure. Thank you. And when we talk about multiversity versus university, it's not meant to be just a play on words. Our higher ed communities, our education communities are really large and complex. I'll throw a few numbers out. We have at Penn State 87,000 students. We have, thinking about this, 37,000 employees And, you know, that's a lot of people. It's a lot of relationships. We have 2,000 buildings. I'm personally trying, I'm in my second, I've started my third year. I'm trying to see as many of those buildings as I can. I'm about 200 buildings in on my tour of—

Wow.

But they're large enterprises. There's lots of different businesses. It is, as Tommy said, an industry of industries in a lot of ways. I think though, if I could just throw a couple more numbers out, this year Penn State, Just a couple months ago, Penn State awarded its 1 millionth degree. And that's a phenomenal number. Thank you. And it's such a big number. I just want to ground it for a second because the more important number is one. My dad is one of those— was one of those million degrees. And I think I watch how He was first in a generation to attend college, and that was a long time ago. But even now, our current student body, 25% of them are first in a generation to ever attend college. So as you all are thinking about becoming an agentic institution, we have to remember we're in the business of changing lives, of lifting entire families, and that's the value of higher ed. And it's a time, Kelly, when we're being questioned, rightfully so, given the cost of higher ed. And so becoming an agentic institution in part is to go at that. But we have to remember, we lift families, we change lives.

I think that's a good reminder for all of us of just how special the work that you do every single day. Thank you for that. And congratulations on the 1 million. That's phenomenal. So that size and scale brings a lot of different opportunities and challenges. Could you share a little more about how you're addressing those?

I think most of us in the room feel these are sharky waters right now that we're all trying to navigate. And whether it's demographic cliff, Pennsylvania is right in— is ground zero for enrollment challenges. And what I mean by that is, We just don't have enough 18-year-olds to go around. And if any of you took economics back in your college journeys, I did, I took it, and you had to do, remember, the supply and demand graphs ad nauseam. There's just not enough 18-year-olds. And I don't know if you know this, but it takes 18 years to make an 18-year-old.

I think after the pandemic, we might see some improvement in that.

So given those challenges and cost challenges and inflation and technology, we're here because our boards are hungry for us to, to be really thoughtful and apply technology carefully, not recklessly, but quickly to some of these problems, see how that can help.

What's interesting, you said quickly because you also are dealing with a vast amount of data. And lots of content. You scared me with a number you said about 2,000 pages. That's a unique value for higher ed, but it also creates challenges with data unification and governance. You guys have a pretty unique approach to that as well.

So data is just— I'm thinking of the poet, and let me see if I get this right, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Anybody remember the— okay. Water, water everywhere, not a drop to drink. Remember this phrase? So for me, it's data, data everywhere, not insight to be had. We have so much data. At Penn State, we have 55 systems of record. And what's it mean if you have 55 systems of record? Where's truth in that? We're drowning in data, but we're parched for actionable insights that work. And so this is the number you and I were chatting about. One part of that data is content. And we have on our public website, we have 2.5 million web pages and objects. So that can be PDFs, but it's a lot of web pages. Oh, just to keep it in context, we have a lot of other websites on other disparate content management systems. But I think our hope was we were going to be able to use AI and layer it like peanut butter over all that data and just solve all of the different content problems that are across that. That's not going to happen. And so we need to, you know, hope's not a strategy, so we better get busy on solving data problems.

Yeah. Well, let's get more specific. Peak enrollment season usually swamps the team, but you're using Agentforce to absorb some of that. What results are you seeing and how are you seeing them so quickly?

And are we— did we actually show some numbers?

We do.

It's up there.

I don't— oh, okay, great. So we are seeing some great results. The one I want to talk about just for a second, though, Kelly, is the other side of the 79%. We talked about sort of that deflection rate, the things that AI and our agents and our strategy can help us answer without humans. But I want to talk about the 21% because I think we need to ground our AI in the expertise, in the experience of our amazing humans that we have that are there with a heart for students that are— and so I think we think of that maybe backwards. Let's start with what are the questions and the key moments that we absolutely want our students to have? easy access to these humans with the experience and expertise. And then let's shift all the other stuff that we can off them to free them up to be that resource. That's the way I think about it.

I actually love that. We talked just a bit ago about the staff experience being so important and advisors having 300, 400, 500 students on that side of the house. So thank you for sharing that. But you've achieved great results. And you're achieving them fast. And that comes with an innovative mindset, not just with the agents, but also how you're bringing AI into every facet of the institution. Can you share about your implementation approach and what's helping drive that?

Yeah, so the speed is probably my key message is we do have to go faster. I think we all feel it in the room. I know it's an expectation of me as a leader. We must because of these pressures. So on our roadmap, let me just give you 3 examples of our most 3 recent Salesforce projects. The first one we scoped, and it took 120 days from launch to go-live. And I'm like, wow, this is the new what's possible. Wait, it gets a little better. Then we did an add-on piece to it, and the second one took 98 days. And then we decided to bring our Bursar in into our enrollment service center.

Bursar?

Bursar across all of our campuses, that function. And that one took us 80 days. So, listen, the days of year and a half, 18-month Salesforce implementation projects, they're gone. We do not have time for those kinds of timelines in our industry. And so I think you have to really lean into that. We've leaned into it. Through several techniques, but one of them is we've been part of a program. We call it Quantum Leap. I don't know if I'm supposed to say that phrase here. I don't know the official Salesforce term, but it's a really innovative idea where we're working with implementation service teams and we're letting them use AI tools to come in and go faster, meet us on this journey, to move faster. And it's incredible, the results. I'm super excited. I think it's a permanent disruption, and I'm happy to go into details about our experience with it outside of this setting. But I think it's a permanent disruption. It's one we've needed for a long time because we just have to move faster.

Well, I think David mentioned to me a few months ago that AI was his second job. I think he's just telling us he wants to go faster so he doesn't have a second job anymore.

Just kidding.

One thing that I think a lot about and how special what you're doing is, and your team, is this holistic approach. We started at the massive scale of Penn State, the impact that you're having, and yet this desire to continue to innovate, to continue to move faster, identifying a problem, tackling it, saying, here's the outcome I want, and how you've clearly had very measurable impact. And I think to close us out, for all of us in the room and for anybody watching online, it would be really great if you could share your advice for all of us and how we could think about how we, you know, we follow in those footsteps and work alongside you and become an agentic university ourselves.

One thing is, I think we have to take really big, complicated problems and challenges like we all face in this room and break them into smaller ones. So chunk it differently, move faster. I really still would like to have more of my time back and spend less thinking about AI. The comment Kelly's making is a conversation that we were in where it just feels like AI is a second job right now to many of us. It just hasn't— it's extra. It's on top. And we're already tired, and we're all trying to solve for these problems. But we're in this together. Don't be just— this is my first Dreamforce. Don't be just a— a force that dreams. We have to be a force that does and acts right now.

I love that. David always gives me really good quips for my future talks. Please join me in thanking David. Thank you for all the work that you're doing, and thank you for being here. Thank you.

Thank you.

Wow.

If I were you, I'd buy David a coffee, a cocktail, Have a snack with him, something. Pick his brain for what they're doing because it's pretty special. I want to take a moment because Penn State is one of our agentic institutions, but we have several who are on that journey, and I want to take a moment to recognize the impact that they're having, whether that's faster, smarter student support or finding those operational efficiencies. Arizona State is one of those. They are tackling multiple. corners of the university with Agentforce. They're in our campground at Agentic Enterprise City, and if you wanna learn more about their journey, please join us there. This was just the start of the product and customer innovation we're gonna talk about for the next 45 minutes or so. So to share more, please join me in welcoming my colleague, Margo Martinez.

Woo!

Thank you, Kelly. Wow, how's everybody doing?

Woo!

It's incredible to see those examples of agentic institutions. And, you know, I've been a part of this incredible community for many, many years, know many, many of you, and I'm incredibly grateful. And it's been a long journey, it's been an awesome journey, and our partnership and commitment to education is rooted in trust. And so as we've been on this journey for the last over a decade, building purpose-built products specifically for the education community, 3 years ago, we launched the reimagined Education Cloud.

Woo!

Awesome.

Woo!

Building a true purpose-built industry cloud for education. And to our design partners, our education advisory councils, And so many of you who have been on this incredible journey with us all these years, I want to say a heartfelt thank you to all of you. Thank you so much for working with us and for giving us your ideas. It's really been an incredible journey. So that brings me back to our platform. This is made possible by Salesforce's deep investment in education over all of these years. And that investment really starts at the foundation with data, trusted and secure data. It moves into applications, business processes that really understand how your institution works, agents who can truly support your students and your staff with true context of your institution. And last but not least, interfaces that understand all that deep context and bring that context to you wherever you work. So today I'm thrilled to share with you all of the incredible innovation that we have planned across these key domains. Now let's start with that trusted, secure data. I was listening to David earlier, 55 sources of truth, y'all, 55. Okay, how many of you have 55 out there? 20? How many of you have a couple sources of truth? I know you got a couple sources of truth. How many do we need? One. We need one. We need a single source of truth, right? So we're doing a lot of that heavy lifting for you, really bringing together and harmonizing and helping you unify your data and activate that data, helping you really gain real-time insights, whether that be through your LMS, through connectors we've built, or through APIs, provide data quality as well as governance, and enabling you to ask more of your data, pulling all that together to help you make sense of it all with rich analytics. Let's move to the application layer. This is where Education Cloud really shines, helping you bring that data to bear and power your work across recruitment and admissions, Academic Operations, Advancement Alumni Relations, Student Financials, which is new, and what's coming next year, which I am thrilled about, Degree Audit. Awesome. Thank you. You're going to hear more about that from Vanessa and team in just a bit. So really excited around the fact that only we are able to really take the number one CRM Bring that together with a next-generation SIS to help you power and harmonize a next-generation student experience. So where do we— does that bring us next?

Agents.

So really having an agent to work alongside your staff, building those purpose-built agents just for education. Our agents have deep domain expertise That they know the education sector. They're deterministic and reliable, knowing your data and knowing what to say, what not to say, and getting things right. They've got compliance and support baked in, and they have zero context switching. And so when you've got an agent working at the beginning of the lifecycle, they continue through the lifecycle with the context that they've learned. Where does the interface come in? Now, who's been wowed by some of the incredible interfaces that you saw today? I mean, it's been absolutely amazing to see where we're at in this world. I think the real big shift here is that it used to be that when you go access your data in Salesforce, you log onto Salesforce, right? But you heard Parker earlier in that little clip saying, actually, maybe you never log onto Salesforce again, right? Maybe. We're bringing the power of Salesforce to you wherever you may work and live, and that's really exciting. We're bringing that same intelligence to you through tools like Slackforce and Agentforce Coworker. All of this is enabling you to really understand your students better and empower your staff. And we're thrilled to be recognized by industry analysts as a leader in education. Super exciting to have that recognition. But who wants to see a lot of this innovation come to life? Who's excited?

Awesome.

Woo!

Would you hand it to my dear colleagues, Keely, Eric, and Claire? Awesome.

Thanks, Margo.

The world of work is being rewritten in real time. The career skills learners need are evolving just as fast, and students feel that whiplash firsthand. What if your institution could move just as quickly as the opportunities that you're preparing your students for? With Salesforce, you can. And with Eric and Claire are going to show you this from 3 different perspectives: leaders, learners, and staff. And we'll start with leadership. The team is prepping for the term when the president drops a message in Slack. She's meeting with Capricorn Coffee to finalize the program and scholarship agreements, and she needs enrollment growth statistics from other partnerships. In the past, pulling this information would mean running from team to team for program and scholarship and enrollment data across multiple systems. But today, the team surfaces it in one place, asks the next question, and gets the president what she needs. We're moving from insight to action. The president has a comprehensive briefing, including the scholarship funding proposal. And the meeting goes great. So good, in fact, that Capricorn wants to launch their program early this coming spring. Now this team needs to move just as fast. The academic operations team needs to take the program information currently living in a static PDF and turn it into live, actionable data. Normally, this takes days of coordination and dozens of clicks. But today, the team turns to Claude and uploads the plan. Hey, AI, meet the number one CRM. Claude doesn't have to guess how to structure this data. It's using a purpose-built Education Cloud skill, and, and based on Salesforce permissions, Every record lands exactly where governance requires. Eric's speeding this up for us, but let's not speed past what's happening here. A 15-page PDF read and understood by a working agent has been turned into over 200 governed live Education Cloud records. No data entry, no IT ticket, No spreadsheets. At the same time, the marketing team uses a campaign agent to quickly build personalized multichannel communications to their target audience. Everyone working from the same playbook, from the same data, towards the same enrollment goals. And now we can see the results. A program that didn't exist weeks ago is live. A strategic partnership turned into a real enrollment opportunity. Now let's take a look at this from the learner perspective. What if your students had 24/7 agentic guidance across that enrollment journey with always-on personalized support? Sophia is a manager at Coppercorn Coffee's regional flagship store, and she's one of those 43 million learners with scattered credits from a few local colleges that never added up to a full credential. She's inspired by that personalized outreach, and she lands on the program page during a break. She just meant to browse, but she finds that she can ask the conversational agent her questions. What's the time commitment? What are my funding options? Areas that have held her back in the past. The agent asked her some questions about those existing credits. And keeps working on her behalf. Sophia accepts its invitation to start an application for her, and she spends her time confirming her information, not filling out a form line by line. Re-energized, Sophia returns to work, and later she gets a notification: her financial aid package is ready. Her scholarship funding and her Expected student and family contributions are clear. No waiting, no separate office to track down. So let's take a look at this from the staff perspective on the other side of the desk. What if weeks of review shrunk to hours and your staff could reclaim that time for high-impact student interactions? Transfer credit evaluation is a spot in the process where doubt can creep in the most. And for students like Sophia, who— where every day allows her to second-guess herself, this time is critical. So Reggie opens Sophia's transfer credit evaluation. With a single click, the system takes into account the equivalency rules and automates that transfer credit request. What used to take weeks now takes hours. Reggie opens Sophia's record. Credits evaluated. What else have we got up there?

Credits evaluated.

She's got her financial aid clear. She's got a personalized care plan already in motion. All this based on what Sophia told us she needed. And every action that's taken since. 3 departments, each doing their part, one comprehensive view of Sophia. Because her journey isn't a series of interactions, it's a story. And the institutions that adapt are the ones that can read it in real time for every student. And what Sophia gets isn't a status update, it's clarity. She's going to finish faster. It's going to cost less. And there's already a team behind her who knows what she needs and where she's headed. This time, she doesn't have to wonder if it's worth it. She knows that it is. In the time it took to tell that story, you saw the same platform pay off in 3 ways. A partnership agreement became a live enrolling program In days, not weeks. That's faster speed to revenue. Transfer credit evaluation transferred from weeks to days— excuse me, from days to hours. And that is taking a cost out of the process and repurposing headcount and hours from paperwork to people. And Sophia enrolled faster With clear next steps and a team already working on her behalf. That's the difference between a prospect and a graduate. Multiply that by every learner, every new program, every partnership your institution is pursuing this year. This is what it looks like when your data, your agents, and your people are all moving at the same speed as the opportunities ahead of you. This is an agentic institution. And now to tell us more about our innovations, please welcome Margot back up to the stage.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Keely. Amazing. All right. So you just saw a lot of innovation in action. Let's walk through what you saw. New CRM and SIS capabilities such as corporate relations, unlocking new revenue streams, as well as student financials. New Tableau Next capabilities enabling you to actually have conversations with your data. Who knows what summer melt means to you? Your data in Tableau Next. Purpose-built agents for the entire student lifecycle. New ones from transfer credit, student financials, financial aid inquiry, and then more coming. Add that to the roster of all of the agents we already support. And Education Cloud made easy with headless. Who are my admins in the room? Raise your hand. I know you're all out. Okay, we got plenty of— exciting. We have new capabilities to make setup experiences Completely seamless, absolutely incredible. And we're making the entire education cloud interfaces headless in the future, and we're bringing more capabilities there with AI Force. Thank you. Awesome. Awesome. I knew those setup experiences would get them. That's awesome. We're also bringing new capabilities to Slack, which is super exciting. Courses set up themselves, and you're able to get more alerts into your faculty. I'll let folks take a picture. I'm sorry, I'm having to move fast. For more around where we're headed next, please don't miss our Education Roadmap tomorrow afternoon. Super exciting. And now, who wants to see another Trailblazer story?

Awesome.

Me too. Please bring to the stage my incredible colleague Vanessa and DePaul University.

Thanks, Margo. Seeing what our teams are delivering in the product is so exciting. I'm so proud of the team. But being able to talk to our customers and see how they're putting our product to work is the very best part of our job. I am joined today by 2 incredible leaders from DePaul University. Bob and Sumitra, thank you so much for being here, and welcome to Dreamforce.

Thank you.

Amazing. So Bob, we're going to start with you. The commitment that DePaul has to student access and economic mobility is incredibly inspiring. When you think about that mission and how you are serving your students towards that mission, what made you realize that you needed to change from the traditional approach, and what did that transformation look like?

That's great. Thank you, Vanessa, and thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. So as you mentioned, economic mobility is a huge piece of our mission. and our value proposition to students. But what we did was we needed to rethink the way we served our students. So, so we need to move from a reactive, passive student delivery model to a dynamic, proactive delivery model. What does that mean and how do we do that? So certain things that we needed to do to do that. The first thing was we needed to adopt case management discipline for student services. So a lot of places for multi-decades now have been thinking about, you know, the student support or One DePaul, as we called it, and lots of those sorts of initiatives. But there's data that you collect with those initiatives. So, for example, we could not ask the question, which of our students were not asking for help because we weren't recording who was asking for help. So there's simple data and simple information that we needed to collect. So David pointed out we've got a lot of data. We don't have a lot of insights. That's a really good example of where we were missing data to insights. But that data layer becomes very, very critical for us. So we really needed to make sure that we've got Data 360 and we're bringing in all of those. In our case, I think we have 300 systems of record, not 55, which is borderline terrifying. So we need to bring that data, make it actionable. And then the final piece we've got to do is we've really got to move to a risk-based approach to serving our students.

Mm-hmm.

which means that we've got to identify which of our students are not at risk, are trending to risk, and then proactively provide help to them. But on top of all of this, this is really about delivering human empathy. David talked about the value of the human, and the human attention is critical here. So for our low-risk students, we want to lean on our agentic strategy. and allow the agents to help those students. For our higher-risk and medium-risk students, we need to get them in front of our humans, and we need to make sure that the humans are helping them.

That's amazing. I love how you're using technology to unlock the human connection rather than replace it. And really, nowhere is that connection more important to the student journey than in financial aid. So, Sumitra, last fall you launched an agent for your staff to tackle this head-on. Obviously, financial aid is super, super complex. Can you tell us more about the data foundation that Bob was talking about and how it was so critical to your success?

Yes, thank you for that question. Financial aid is just so incredibly— you're right— so incredibly important for student success. And last fall when we launched this, we needed to deliver on a couple of things to make that work. If you work in financial aid, you know it's important, but you also know it has become a little bit more complicated these days. So we needed to address that. We needed to save up staff time so that they could They could have that time, as Bob said, to be more empathetic and more human with the students that they're trying to help. That's one. 2 is keep up with the changing world of rules and regulations and provide a much deeper assessment of student requests or student cases so that we're maximizing on every opportunity for students.

I love that.

So we launched the financial aid agent that now is built on trusted data sources both within DePaul So our own data, our own processes and manuals, but also external data such as federal and state sources. And it runs through a 53-point check for every student and comes up with insights.

That's amazing. And cutting through that administrative noise is what we all need right now. But it sounds like especially your staff, you know, of course, deploying AI, Bob, is, is more than just a technology project. It's also a cultural shift. How did you use change management to help build that trust and so that they knew that the AI was there to help empower them?

That's a great question. Like a lot of what we do, there's a trap here, right? You think about AI and you think it's a technology project. It's not.

It's—

this is about humans. This is about process. It's about technology. And I don't think it's— and it's more important now than ever to really think about the human piece. Again, we're putting human empathy at the very top They're very paramount of everything that we do. But just like all of you, we can't hire enough people to serve all of our students. It's just not— it's just not a fair fight, as it were. So we've got to figure out how to use this technology and how to maximize these humans' time. And so the agent that Sumitra described— so there's 2 pieces to what we built. The first piece is it's a financial summary. So a student comes into the financial aid office, meets with a counselor, Very quickly, the counselor can get a financial summary of that student's situation. And then the second thing we provide was an action plan, a recommended action plan for that student. Both of those happen within the first minute or so of the appointment. That frees up the counselor to have a human-level conversation with that student for the rest of the appointment.

Mm-hmm.

So this isn't about shorter appointments. This is about maximizing that time. The financial aid counselors— this is a stressful situation. This needs high empathy. And so that's what we're trying to do with this technology to make sure that the technology is giving context, the humans delivering the message, and is in control.

That's amazing. I mean, to let the AI do the heavy data lifting so that your people can bring the empathy, that's a very powerful framework. You know, Samidra, I love that you're not stopping there, though. We've got the— we've been partnering with our team on the student-facing agent. that we just launched in the product literally a few weeks ago. So I think, you know, you all now having heard the vision, I think we should see these 2 agents in action, right? Come on, let's get excited. So to walk us through the demo, please welcome my colleague Adam. Adam and Sumitra, take it away.

Thank you.

Thanks so much, Vanessa. Hi, Sumitra.

Hi, Adam.

Well, I think we should show some folks our student Sophia, our prospective student.

Let's do it.

So let's take a look at how she's going to be able to navigate admissions and financial aid using that new student-facing agent that we're implementing together.

So Sophia is our applicant. Like most applicants applying to college for the first time, one of the things Sophia will be worried about is, did you receive my FAFSA? So once this agent is fully launched and active, what Sophia will be able to see is, yes, Deepal has received her FAFSA. She's good. She's good to go.

Exactly. And so now let's fast forward, and Sophia has been accepted. She's in her second year of school, and she's come across a problem. She's not able to register. And so let's see if we can get to the bottom of that mystery.

Yeah, so this is one of those pivotal points in Sophia's journey. She has done all of the things that she's supposed to do. She's trying to register for next quarter's classes, but oh, oh, can't. There is a block. There is a registration hold. She cannot proceed. Sophia is still logged in. Sophia asks the agent in the same window, why can't I register? The agent goes through Sophia's entire record, academic record, financial record, and finds that Sophia is facing a problem that is a compounding problem, but a fairly common problem, which is Sophia owes the university money. She owes the university money because a loan has not dispersed. The loan has not disbursed because this is a loan that Sophia has to accept every single year, and she forgot to do that. So it's a compounding problem but could become a very big deal.

Very big deal, consequential. And so we— right here in that interaction, we can see how quickly she's able to really work through those 3 compounding issues and get out of the way and get that loan disbursed. So let's fast forward one more step, and she's actually gone ahead and accepted that loan, that super important step. the loan has dispersed, and I understand that at DePaul there's a process where the academic hold needs to be lifted by academic advisors.

Yes, so we want, as Bob mentioned before, we want to maximize on or optimize as much human interaction as we can. That's part of our ethos. So we want Sofia to meet with her academic advisor. The financial steps have been taken, it's all good, it's all cleared. The advisor has now lifted the hold so the two of them can sit down and talk about which classes she must select, how would the academic quarter go, so on and so forth. So this is where—

The magic happens.

Sorry?

This is where the magic happens.

This is where the most beautiful thing happens, right? Because the advisor has a summary, the administrative steps have been taken care of, now they have time to have conversation. In that conversation, what comes up is Sophia is— as they're selecting classes, Sophia is really worried about her class load. Why is she worried? Because she is, turns out, doing multiple jobs. Why is she doing multiple jobs? Because even with financial aid, even with loans, even with the support that she has, it is a stretch. That comes up in the conversation. Sophia tells her advisor that she has put in an appeal with the financial aid office, has not heard back, really worried. Hearing that, the advisor now nudges the financial aid office by raising a case. That the financial aid officer will later see.

And here's, again, that common compounding issues, but beautified by that experience that helps the advisor really do what they do best. And so then that brings us to the last part. That brings us to our staff experience. And what will our financial aid counselors see next?

So the advisor has raised the case. We're now logged in as the financial aid advisor. This is the staff-facing agent that our financial aid counselors now use. They're busy. If you know anyone or if you are related to financial aid, you know how busy every season has been. So there are loads and loads of cases that they're working through. In this particular case, it took the agent just a couple of seconds barely to run through Sophia's FAFSA history, Sophia's appeals, academic history, and present that to the financial aid counselor who will be looking at this appeal. And also make recommendations about what might best fit Sophia's particular situation. In this particular instance, the outcome is great. Turns out the income adjustment appeal that Sophia had made worked out, and Sophia therefore became eligible for a $2,000 grant from the institution and also importantly a $5,000 grant from state and federal sources. Now she has these 2 grants available.

And there's one more thing left for her to do.

Now, it's not enough for the financial aid counselor to know that. Sophia needs to know this, right? So the financial aid counselor directly from the agent can now generate an email that the counselor will now send over to Sophia to go into her financial aid portal to accept those 2 grants. Now Sophia has additional financial support.

And sometimes we miss emails, and that's what we were able to get to her. And so now all that's left for her to do is go in and accept those funds.

Yes. So really, what you saw in this is these critical moments that a student goes through. So consider the first one, which is Sophia went through a moment of anxiety of not being able to register. Could have stopped her in her tracks. Didn't because of the— live 24 contextual support that she could do and intelligent enough systems. Second is the, the really powerful moment of having that conversation with her academic advisor, which really unlocked additional potential and additional planning for Sophia. And then the third is, even with all of this work pressure, time crunch, the financial aid counselor was able to unlock additional funding for Sophia. So now she can afford her education at DePaul.

The most important part. And that's the power of Salesforce, right? That's giving those students that self-service clarity 24 hours a day, giving your staff with these 53 points being able to check, supercharging them, and really demystifying financial aid and setting students up to a fast track to student success. Well, Sumitra, I've got to say, I think Gwen Stefani said it best. That was bananas.

No doubt.

Amazing.

Well, Sumitra, thank you so much for getting Sophia back on track. Thank you to you and Bob and everyone from the DePaul team for everything you do to get other students like Sophia moving successfully every day. Thank you so much. Let's give it up for DePaul University. Well, folks, before we head you off with— but wait, there's more. We've got 3 reminders for you next up. Our education sessions do continue starting with the Education Cloud Roadmap featuring Gordon College. That'll be at 12 noon tomorrow. Please hope— we'll hope to see you there. If you have not yet been to the campground, please check out our booth down there, including Arizona State University. And then finally, please join us in giving back. Please visit Howard Street and Dreamforce Gives to help support Bay Area public schools, something certainly very close to my heart. With that, thank you all so much. Enjoy Gwen and Usher tonight. Have a great Dreamforce and enjoy the rest of your Dreamforce.

Good night.