Create Your AI-Powered Connected Campus | Education Keynote, Dreamforce 2025
Kelly Kitchen, Joe Wiggins, Margo Martinez, and others showed how Salesforce's AgentForce and unified data platform help universities scale personalized learning and cut manual work. DeVry University automated onboarding with AgentForce, pushing orientation completion toward 90%. University of Kentucky built an AI agent called Betty to connect families to resources and ease navigator burnout.
Chapters
Senior Vice President and General Manager, Education Salesforce, Kelly Kitchen.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Welcome to the education keynote here at Dreamforce25. It is such an honor to be here surrounded by so many passionate leaders, innovators and change makers in education. This is my 13th Dreamforce and it is always a special time to connect with and learn from each other and also to be inspired. I want to start with a thank you. Thank you to our customers. You being here is a demonstration of your dedication and commitment to institution and learner success. To our partners, thank you for completing our work and bringing our customers vision to life and accelerating their transformation. And to all of you, thank you for making this education community all that it is. Over the next 50 minutes, we're going to spend some time connecting the themes of Dreamforce to education. We're going to hear from two inspiring customers, DeVry University and from my home state, the University of Kentucky College of Social Work. And of course you're going to see product innovation. But let's talk about this moment that we're in. Research tells us that we're at a pivotal time in education. And I know from conversations with so many of you that the demands for you to be more connected, efficient and agile have never been greater. All while also being challenged to find new revenue opportunities and new operational efficiencies. And while your students want more empathy and to be at the center of their experience, it's no wonder that your staff is challenged with the pace of change, particularly on their own. But the big question then is, what if you could scale personalized experiences for your learners and at the same time empower those who are at the heart of your mission? Well, the short answer is that agentic AI is going to play a huge role here at Dreamforce. Last year we launched AI AgentForce and agents that could reason and take action. Over the course of the last year, we've seen agents transforming experiences and delivering on those expectations with our customers. Now we know that education leaders are saying that agents can free up valuable time for high impact activity. And you know, students aren't just receptive to agents, they often prefer them because they can give them 24. 7 support. So while those expectations are rising, this is the opportunity to rise higher, evolve, grow stronger and lead the way in this AI world. But how do I do that? Where do I go next? Well, we all know that you can't build a future on a shaky foundation. It starts with your data. Many of you have heard me say it before, you'll hear me say it today. And probably again and again. You are in a unique position to take advantage of this AI world because you have so much valuable data. But what you need is a modern platform that takes you from point A to point B. A platform that unifies your data and transforms it into real time insights. A platform that seamlessly integrates AI into the way you work, connecting workflows all across your institution such that humans and agents together can deliver impact. And that's where Salesforce comes in. Only Salesforce can bring together your data, AI and apps in a deeply unified platform such that you can deliver on those experiences, meet those expectations, and also adapt and thrive. Not just now, but into the future. We've already seen agents in recruiting and admissions helping drive those enrollment goals. In advising, where it's freeing up time so that advisors can deepen relationships and affect retention. And also in advancement, where real time donor insights can impact your fundraising goals. We're not going to stop building those capabilities. In fact, you're going to hear more about new innovations today. This is the AI and agent powered connected campus. And Salesforce is committed to being your partner, to turning those challenges into opportunities. As an organization, we encourage a test and learn mindset because while this technology is powerful, true transformation requires a strategic vision, committed leadership and an empowered staff. Over the course of the last year, I want to take a moment because we've had a lot of trailblazing institutions who are leading the way in the sygentec world. They're already realizing impacts in student support and other operational efficiencies. I'd like to hear from one of those customers today. Would you?
Yeah.
All right.
Please join me in giving a warm dream force welcome to my colleague Joe Wiggins and our trailblazing CIO from DeVry University.
Thank you, Joe.
Thank you, Kelly. And thank you to devry for being here with us today. Can we just give one more round of applause for DeVry for sharing their story with us today.
Thank you, Joe. Happy to be here.
Yeah, thanks, Chris. And a fun fact many of you may not be aware of. DeVry was one of the original education customers that launched on the platform nearly two decades ago. Since being a pioneer and an innovator is at the core of who DeVry is, it's no surprise they're creating an AI powered institution focused on learner and institutional success. Chris, we couldn't be more thrilled to have you here with us today.
Super excited.
Thank you, Chris. I know that DeVry tries to serve this, those student populations with working adults, career oriented learners. How has that shaped your mission for.
DeVry, you know, at DeVry, our mission is pretty simple, but we think very urgent.
Right.
And that is to help our learners thrive in careers that are shaped by constant continuous technological change. And we think it's really relevant for our, the students that we serve, where 83% of our students are older than 25 years, they're older than 25, and over half of them have children and are parents, and 100% of them are working adults. They're holding down full time jobs, careers, home lives, while they are seeking to enhance their career. About a third of our students are very focused on enhancing their career. The next third of those are, interestingly enough, they're very interested in switching their career.
Right.
So they are coming back to school to do something completely different. And the remaining group of our students are looking to pursue a career for the first time, often the first time in their family still in these days. So we believe they come to us for not for tradition, they're coming to us for transformation. They're looking to reskill and upskill quickly and build their own lifetime resilience.
You know, it's interesting that the non traditional learner is really becoming the traditional learner all of a sudden. And something I've always been really impressed with, Chris, is that you're always trained to create an always on experience for your learners no matter where they are in the world, no matter what time it is. That's always been so inspiring that you all do that at DeVry. And it's really great to hear how you're equipping all of your learners with AI right in the classroom today. And in just the last year, you've created an AI powered institution. Can you walk us through that approach and how you got there?
Sure. Given the students and the diversity, given our students and the diversity of their aspirations, we, we have developed an always on lifelong learning platform that they really never have to leave. That's our goal. And so as we work through that process, the thing that I would call your attention to is as Joe mentioned earlier, that Salesforce has been a cornerstone in our digital transformation for probably nearly 20 years. And it's allowed us to really centralize experiences, actions and outcomes in one spot, which is cascaded into the ability for us to have a very unified data strategy, which then in turn has allowed us to modernize and streamline experiences and personalize experiences, almost every interaction for our learners. And so we've continued down that journey. That is our focus. We need to have an always on university. Our students do the majority of their learning after work, often late at night, after they handle their family commitments, home commitments, et cetera. And that when they're working, when they're doing their learning activities, which is usually as I share with you, but somewhere between 7pm and 1am, that's when the majority of them are online. And our faculty and advisors are typically offline during that time. Agent Force has allowed us to extend our care model even more than we used to, to meet the students where they are with the information they need at the pace their life requires.
And how has creating this AI powered institution helped your persistence over the last decade?
One of the things that we're most proud of at DeVry University is that over the last decade we've been making year over year improvements in persistence. Some of the recent innovations that we've done include rebuilding our new student orientation. Everybody here knows how important getting your students oriented to be jumped off to a good experience. Devry onboards about 4,700 new students every eight weeks. There's lots of you in here that work at even greater scales. But what it's allowed us to do is leveraging data cloud. In this case, we were able to completely transform the learner onboarding solution. That solution now used to be very manual. Lots of list shipping. We had merging lists from disparate systems. We leverage marketing cloud for that now with data Cloud, we've been able to fully automate that. We can do segmentation, we can do specific students, we can put you on different journeys. And we've eliminated about 500 hours of manual work annually through that process. And, and probably one of the things that's more exciting even is that it ladders directly to student success because we increased the participation and we saw direct impact to our persistence and retention metrics.
And I think it's the highest it's been in the last.
It is, it is. We're super excited. Our persistence is at the highest level it's ever been. We've seen year over year improvements for the last decade. And the thing I'm even more excited about, we are on the precipice of crossing over to 90% persistence.
That's great.
And this solution we recently put in place was key to moving that needle.
Definitely something to be proud about. Congratulations on that, Chris. And something I've always been really impressed with with you, Chris, over the last several years of us working together is your test and learn mindset. Which brings me to AgentForce. How are you implementing agents today to support both your learners and, and your staff?
So we're deploying Agent. We knew that we would have to rethink how our university operates to really take advantage of AgentForce. And the place that we chose to deploy one of our very first agents was on our new platform called devry Pro. Devry Pro is a continuing education self service platform where professionals can come to upskill and reskill and specifically learning AI skills with stackable certificates and AI driven content and an AI driven learning experience even super powerful. We were fortunate to partner with Salesforce and the product team and we built that agent that's. That's prospect facing. We built that agent on the new course search template. So really excited about that. And it engages with our pro perspective learners automatically helps them select the right course for them, helps them move through the enrollment and even the payment processes. And the thing we're most proud of is that we launched the devry Pro platform in about four, four and a half months from inception to deploy. And we haven't had to increase our team size at all. We didn't have to add advisors, we didn't have to add billing people. We didn't have none of that. So we've been able to. We're not taking phone calls, selling courses or trying to advise to that particular platform. And that was directly because of leveraging Agent 4.
I love it. If I was sitting in the audience today, I would want to see some of this innovation come to life. So we have my colleagues, Rachel and Jim. Hey, Rachel and Jim, can you bring to Life the DeVry's Story and Show how they're supporting institutional and learner success at scale?
We sure can, Joe.
Okay, great.
Now I am so thrilled to be here on the demo stage with my partner in crime, Jim Ferguson. Now, Jim, I've heard through the grapevine this is a pretty surreal moment for you, is that right?
It is, Rachel.
So I worked for DeVry University for 12 years and back in 2008, they sent me to my first Dreamforce and my first deep exposure to Salesforce.
Seventeen years later, I get to work at Salesforce and have the privilege of.
Sharing their success story on this stage today.
That's awesome. Now, I honestly can't think of a better way to kick off this demo. So Jim, you ready to dive in?
All right, let's do it.
Awesome. Now, onboarding is a critical part of every student experience. However, DeVry was spending 11 hours every single week manually pulling data from multiple systems to power their onboarding experience. Just think about that for a minute. That's approximately 40 hours every month and if you do the math, that's essentially like losing a full workweek every month due to these manual data polls. Now, with thousands of students onboarding every eight weeks, DeVry knew there had to be a better way. So let me show you how they solve this problem with humans and agents working together. Let's say I want to create an onboarding campaign for students who have logged into their portal but haven't attended an orientation session yet. With agent forest and data360 working hand in hand, I can specifically target this group of students that miss this critical onboarding step. Now, before, creating segments meant vlookups and spreadsheets, but now Zeta 360 is automatically creating these segments, pulling together key information across DeVry's LMS, University Data Store and orientation registration. I can quickly generate email copy with a clear call to action to sign up for an upcoming orientation session. And I can even optimize the send time. So if a working professional is checking their email in the early morning with a cup of coffee, or maybe late at night with a glass of wine, they're getting that email in their inbox at the perfect time for them. And in just a few clicks, I've got all the campaign assets I need. They're on brand, they're ready to go, and I can get this out the door fast. Plus, the admissions team is kept in the loop every step of the way so they can track student engagement. Now, instead of manually pulling data from multiple systems and trying to figure out the right onboarding message to send to each student, DeVry has one unified platform to do it all. And the best part is that they've been able to increase the completion rates of their new student orientation by 227 basis points. That's pretty incredible, right? Well, let's take this one step further and explore how DeVry is supporting the enrolled student experience. Experience as well. Let's say I'm currently a Devry student and I'm looking for some career support late at night after work. Now, prior to AgentForce, my only option would be to engage with a legacy chatbot like you're seeing here, with really limited topics and one way answers. But now with AgentForce, I can get 24. 7 conversational support directly in my student portal. So if I have a question regarding my career path, I can get the tailored help I need fast. Now, in the background, Dita 360 is pulling together key information across DeVry's academic catalog and career services materials. To answer my question, the agent already knows what I'M studying, which saves me a ton of time and provides some helpful recommendations, including an upcoming virtual career event recently posted on the Hire DeVry platform and an easy way for me to sign up for a career advising appointment or all in one place. Plus, if I have any questions regarding what courses I need to take when I can get a tailored academic plan sent to me in no time. But devry is not stopping there. Later in life I can check out devry Pro to explore short on demand courses to help me reskill and upskill in today's AI era. I can let the agent know what my current job is and what I'm looking for in this next step of my career. Course Search Support powered by AgentForce Education recommends the AI essentials for analysts course and I love that I have a digital badge to add to my LinkedIn profile and resume. So I'll go ahead, add that course to my cart and check out now. You just saw how DeVry is creating an always on ecosystem of support with Agentforce at the center and building a true lifelong learning continuum at every single step. Back to you Joe.
Wow, that was incredible. Chris. Those outcomes really speak to your commitment and DeVry's commitment to student success. I'd love to see it. I have one last question for you that's kind of a two parter. Okay, what's next for you? And for those wanting to embark on a similar journey, what's one piece of advice you'd have for them?
So for us we're really focused on reimagining how the university operates and we think Agent Force is a big part of that. We're really excited about the opportunities in personalization across the student journey. We expect that to continue at pace and in fact we expect it to build up. We are super excited about the new SIS capabilities and the opportunities it's going to provide us across the university. They're substantial and we're really leaning in and working hard with your product team and all the latest innovations of Agent Force and how we're going to leverage that as a very AI driven kind of organization. A little bit bigger scale. One of the things that we're super excited about at devry is our commitment to drive AI literacy, applied AI literacy in each and every course. 100% of our coursework by the end of the year will have AI literacy built in. So you'll be coming away not just with the career knowledge that you need, but also durable skills like problem solving, adaptability, critical thinking, as well as how to use AI to most effectively Perform your role. And I think that speaks volumes to what we're seeing in the market.
Right.
Everybody's worried about what AI is going to do to your job. I think it's more about the person next to you that knows how to use AI. What are they going to do to your job? That's a big part of our journey. What I would say as far as next steps, I would say look to your mission, identify the moments or moment that matters the most to your learner and seek to apply AI there for all the right reasons. Personalization, timeliness, modality, fill in the blank. And just more than anything, just get started. Everybody's journey is going to be a little bit different, but nobody's going to build resilience by standing still.
Awesome. I love it. Chris. Let's give it up for Chris. Thanks to. That's not all from Devry. If you want to check them out, go to the Agent Force City. They have a campground there. We'd love to have you. And with that said, that's not the last of our product and customer innovation for today. Please welcome my colleague, Margo Martinez. But before we do, Chris has one last announcement for the team.
Yeah, so I'm super excited. We launched our new devry Pro platform about six months ago and it's getting really great reviews. And for everybody participating at Dreamforce this year, we are able to offer a 30% discount. I strongly encourage you to go check it out. It's some really great content on how to leverage AI in your career.
Awesome. Thanks, Chris. Thanks all. Thank you, Margo.
Amazing.
Thank you. Thank you.
Wow, that sounds incredible. I'm signing up. I am signing up. How about everybody here? All right, so it's incredible to hear how Devry University is innovating with AgentForce and more. And you know, AI is at the very heart of our product innovation. And so we ask ourselves, what if, what if your advisors and your recruiters had a digital teammate? And what if, what if your students had personalized support every step of the way? And what if you could identify your donors in real time? Today you can. We're thrilled to share that Agent Force Education is all of the power you know and love from education Cloud. Infused with purpose built agents, we've launched over 20 agentic workflows and that's topics, actions and flows. To help you get started more quickly with your top use cases. We have agents for advising, support, philanthropic research, student recruitment and more. We're not stopping there. We'll be launching agents for student financials and transfer credits and much, much more. And with our deeply unified platform, your agents will never be operating in silos. And this is of course, all made possible by our commitment to education just in the past year. Look at all of the incredible capabilities we've launched. Absolutely incredible purpose built for education available today. And you know, it's wonderful to continue to receive accolades from our industry analysts who know, who doesn't love a gold star? But we're not stopping there. We've got more functionality on the way to help you boost enrollment, retention and fundraising with new capabilities around career support, goal setting, transfer, equivalency and gift planning. But last Dreamforce, we began to dream bigger. And we asked ourselves, what if. What if your student information system could transform, moving from transactional to truly transformational? And what if it could move from being simply a system that records the past to one that actually powers the future? So we began to reinvent the Student Information System. Only Salesforce brings together CRM +SIS +AI for a student centered next generation student information system. And look at how far we've already come with capabilities around course registration, business processes and workflows. And we're not stopping there. We continue the journey. We are thrilled to announce that we have our new student financials module launching in the spring. But for more around where we're headed next, please don't miss our roadmap session coming back tomorrow. So I want to pause for a moment and I want to say a big thank you. Thank you so much to our Higher Education Advisory Council, to our product advisory councils, and all of you in our design partner program. Thank you so much. We really couldn't innovate this quickly without you. Now, who would like to see this innovation come to life? All right, take it away, Navneet and Mark.
Great. Thank you, Margo. Okay, with the help of my colleague Mark, we're going to show you how agentic AI can help you to meet your strategic goals from three different perspectives. Staff, students and leaders. So let's start with many of you in the room. Our staff research shows that375.1 is the average student to adviser ratio. There are too many student cases and there is not enough time. And 43% of staff say that they do not have access to the information that they need when they need it. But just imagine if you could get a fast, unified view of every student and the time back to focus on higher value support and deeper connections. You can with Salesforce. So here I am, an academic advisor and I'm looking at my caseload dashboard. I Can see all of the students who have been added to my watch list. And here I see Sophia, who's about to come in for an appointment. Now in the past I would have to jump between multiple different systems just to get a basic understanding of Sofia's situation, which actually took away from our time together. But now I can go to my agent and I can get a complete summary of all of Sofia's history, her academic progress, her personal interests and more. It's all here. I can even ask my agent for recommendations on how to prioritize our time together. Now when we meet, Sophia tells me that she's struggling with her assignments this term. Based on that, I ask my agent to pull up relevant planning and time management resources so I can stay fully focused on Sophia. When our meeting ends, I ask my agent to schedule a follow up appointment with Sophia. Let me pause here. Only Salesforce can connect the data, the insights and the next steps. Now I know from my own time in teaching and advising to be truly effective, I can't work in a silo. Student success requires collaboration across the institution. But sharing information can be slow and it can delay critical support. But now I can make sure that any member of Sophia's success team can follow up with her directly. From her student record. The right information is shared securely and in context. And for the faculty member, they see the message where they're already doing their work in Slack. And they can easily switch between their course channels and student support. Ensuring that faculty, staff and students and advisors are all working together to provide holistic student support. So what's the end result? No administrative burden or blockers, Only seamless collaboration and staff who have a digital teammate so they can regain time to focus on what matters most. Ensuring that every student is seen, heard and supported. Okay, let's switch to our second perspective and show you what Agentic AI can do for your students. 44% of students select their institution for career prospects. But only 18% feel very prepared for the world of work. So despite everything that institutions are doing, everything that you all are doing, there is still an opportunity to better meet students career expectations. So just imagine if you could guide your students with personalised planning and skill development to meet their career goals. You can with Salesforce. So here's Mark. He's a student in his junior year. Not this Mark for the record, but a Mark who has just completed his summer internship in environmental science. Mark's curious about this field, so he takes an assessment to better understand his strengths and weaknesses and also the skills that he can Develop. Mark needs to set goals that align to his career needs and also find campus resources that can support his journey. So here the agent sets goals based on all of the information that it has about Mark, academic career, engagement, well being, plus the recently submitted assessment. And it comes up with a plan of action based on all of the campus resources that can help him to work towards that goal. If we fast forward, we can track the progress, Mark's progress in all of the workshops, the programs, and all the skills that he's developed along the way. So what's the end result? Institutions increase student satisfaction. How? Because students get that support that we all probably needed at some point in our journeys, but that feels deeply personal, timely and actionable on the path to meeting their life goals. Back to you, Margo.
Amazing. Thank you so much, Navneet. Now Mark, don't leave the stage just yet. Not yet. I'm going to give the audience here a behind the scenes peek at that advising agent that you just saw. So now here we are in agentforce and each of our digital advisors have behind them a series of topics and actions. What we learned from all of you is that this is basically an advisor's to do list. This is all of the things that they need to do before or after meeting with their students. And it can be a long list, right? We saw those incredibly high ratios earlier. Now when you click into any of these actions, this is further underpinned by an entire library of prompts. Now this is months upon months of engineering work that we are delivering to you out of the box. But what you're not seeing behind the scenes is that each of these is further underpinned by our education data model rich business processes designed for education. All of this is coming Together with data 360 with across your campus and core systems coming through mulesoft, powering this agent and turning this agent into a digital teammate for your advisors. Now you just saw how with our topics, our actions, this all transforms this agent into a digital teammate. Being able to pull together resources with knowledge, campus resources, answer questions and summarize cases. All of this essentially enables them to provide that true 360 degree view of that student. And this is how your advisors and agents work together to deliver high impact advising. Now we're not done innovating yet. Across the 360 we are bringing together the ability to unify and activate any data, the ability to have purpose built integrations with your LMS to turn every conversation into action, with our conversational interface powering faculty and also Fundraising teams and the ability to ask more of your data in natural language. Now, who would like to see more of this innovation come to life? All right, hand it back over to you, Mark.
Great.
Okay, not getting rid of me yet. Third and final perspective. We're going to show you how agentic AI can help education leaders. Our research shows that 60% of leaders are under pressure to find new revenue streams. So just imagine if you could get a quick. You could unlock the real time insights needed to find new efficiencies and new revenue streams to safeguard your institution. You can with Salesforce. So here I am, I'm now a VP of Advancement and I'm looking at my dashboard here. I can see new donors, I can see average gift amount and more. Having these data points synthesized is so important because I'm not a data scientist. But I can immediately see where I need to focus my efforts so I can get back to high expertise work faster. I asked my agent which appeal generated the most money in a matter of seconds. I can see the appeal with the highest donations so I can take action. And when I'm preparing for a meeting with an important alumni, I can see how that alumni is engaging with the institution. I can also think about how to create strategic campaigns that align to their interests. So what's the end result? Leaders get to focus on what matters most because they have the time back to think about their mission critical work of generating revenue for their institution. Only agentic AI from Salesforce can give you the agility to meet your strategic goals. Okay. You can learn more about everything that you've seen today with our new education trailhead modules. But for now, I'm going to hand it back to my colleague Kelly Kitchen for another to hear from another trailblazer from the University of Kentucky College of Social Work.
Thank you, Navneet.
Wow.
What exciting innovations we've gotten to see this morning. It's as exciting as that was though, I am more excited to welcome Dr. Jay Miller, the dean of the College of Social Work at the University of Kentucky. Dean Miller, thank you so much for being here.
Thank you.
Thank you for having me.
I appreciate it.
Thank you.
You notice I wore my Kentuckian Devry blue, by the way. Thank you. So let's start by talking about the College of Social Work's mission.
Sure.
Your mission is to develop outstanding professional scholars. Professionals and leaders that promote societal well being. Could you tell us a little bit about that mission?
Yeah.
So of course, as it sounds, it's a big mission and I'm very fortunate. I Say, every day I get to wake up and go to the best job ever, because I work with a bunch of folks who just get it. And for those of, you know, folks just get it. You know what I mean? And I think the thing that they get is what makes our mission go. And it's this concept that a university is a very expansive space. We often talk about the academic student serving pieces, which we should, but we don't often get to talking about the research and service missions of the university. And so we're in a space where, as we think about how we've evolved or how we meet the needs of not just students, but faculty, staff, the larger community, our mission has been really laser focused on this concept of making the college, and in turn, the university, an ideal place to be empowered and engaged and educated. And that's what we strive to do every day.
Well, and I've been told that this mission is deeply personal to you. Could you tell us a little bit about that?
It is. So I grew up in foster care, and I say all the time, my name is Jay and I grew up in foster care. And everybody says, aww. And I say, what the hell you on about? Foster care is the best thing that ever happened to me. Not because it was perfect, but because I know the alternative. And I think at the end of the day, when you come into an academic space with that kind of drive, you get to see the potential of what could be. And so really knowing and understanding people's plights and conditions and the spaces they're in, it really drives us to think differently about the academic space and to leverage it in a different way.
I think it's actually, thank you for sharing that and also being vulnerable about that. I think it's a great reminder, as you said, of how broad of a reach a university really has. And I think we sometimes forget that. Not on purpose, but we've discussed some of the key initiatives of the College of Social Work, what you've done to affect constituent experiences. Could you talk a little bit about the ripple effect of those programs out into the communities and how technology has played a role in that?
Yes. I think technology is at the core of everything that we do. And I'll often say technology is the tool that we use to better serve people, and those people are all over the space. But in terms of a college, we like to move fast. And so we've had a lot of enrollment growth, a lot of research enterprise growth. We've launched new centers and labs that really aim to not only serve folks out in the community, but to offer our students these very, very unique learning experiences. I always talk about day one concepts. I want folks to come to school, I want them to get trained and educated, and I want them to be ready for the job on day one. I often say it's sometimes frustrating to hear you hire somebody and then, well, we're going to show you how we really do that here. I said, why don't we just show them in school so they can be ready on day one? And so through a lot of our centers and labs, initiatives, projects, we've been able to not only just impact external facing, but create opportunities for our faculty and staff as well as our students that they otherwise wouldn't have.
I think one of my favorite emails that I've received is from you where you talked about how you see objects and I see opportunity. So it's a great, great reminder for us too. But one of the things that over the years I've gotten to know you, one of the things that has inspired me is this kinship navigator program. As an academic leader, can you talk about how you identified within that program the use cases for your agents?
Yeah.
So I'll start.
I want to introduce you to somebody. Her name is Betty Lou. Betty Lou is my grandmother. And like I said, having grown up in care, my sisters and I were in a number of different places, spaces. But Betty Lou is a grandmother's grandmother. She was always the stable force for us. I say she's the type of grandmother who still had plastic on some of the couches that you could sit on in her house. Or she had this thing where she thought that you could get electrocuted if you talked on a cordless phone and it was storming outside. She was one of those, she didn't need a clock, she just knew what time it was. And I watched her year after year pop up out of bed, go to the factory and work, and then try to come home and take care of my two younger sisters and me. And so it gets you to thinking about these really, really pragmatic problems and how we can figure out leveraging tools to come up with solutions for those problems. So with Betty Lou in mind, we a few years ago kicked off a concept around this kinship resource center. And so you have to understand, I know you came to an education keynote and probably never thought you'd be talking about grandparents, but it's really understanding the expansive space that a university is in. And so we launched a program through our research space. It was our kinship resource center and the center launched a navigator program. And the navigator program was all around this concept of connecting relatives who were taking care of kids to resources in the community. Now it seems like a very easy thing to do, but it's a huge barrier to getting people what they need as opposed to giving them just what we have. And so as we set out to plan that program, we started to think about the best ways to serve the grandparents. Now you got to know for context, in the United States there are about two and a half million kids who are in the care of relatives. That's about 4% of all the kids in the country are in the care of relatives. Most of the time it's a grandparent. You see it a lot of times in states that have been ravaged by substance misuse, et cetera, where the parents are no longer able to take care of those kids. And in Kentucky, for context, we're about double that rate. So we had this kind of national problem that was really hitting home in Kentucky and decided to respond with this navigator program. Now the way the navigator program works is you think starting off old school, there's a referral that's made, there's someone on the phone that's talking to you, listening to the challenges you're having and trying to respond. But think about what that means is I don't know who's going to call, I don't know what needs they're going to have, I don't know how to find things in the community that I can refer and connect them to. And so we would have agents on the phone doing these assessments they're working through. And just about the time it got to that frustrating point where you didn't know what to do, we introduced an agent and the agent was all around helping the navigator to find, assess and work through treatment planning and making connections to resources. And so through that agent you're able to be in a space to where you can always know the resources and what's available. And it's allowed the navigators to really focus their time on the people stuff that we want them to do. Being on the phone, being connected, assessing through in the needs and to not have to worry about getting off and making calls and going down a bunch of dead end roads. And so the agents really empowered the navigators. We also see it as a wellness issue with staff. So being able to get them into spaces where their work just doesn't burn them out, it's a supportive piece that allows them to do the work different and at the end of the day impact Families in a different way.
It's a very emotional space for them to be in, to work every day. So thank you for that. And also lots of resources available, but not knowing how to navigate to the point of navigating. But how do I take advantage of the right resources and programs at the right time?
Yes, and I think that's.
It's a.
It's a big piece that, again, we don't often think about. So many times we give people what we have instead of giving them what they need. And having the agent in this space has really allowed us to connect them with what they need, which is a very different thing.
And you named that agent?
We did. The agent's name is Betty.
Louis had to tell you that. Well, given this pace of change in education and technology, it's clear that the opportunity to lead is now. You've shown us how innovation can lead anywhere across campus. What advice would you give to the folks in the room for how they can embrace this innovative spirit and move forward together?
Get about the business of doing it. Sometimes we make it way more complex than it needs to be. And to get about that business, it really starts with seeing beyond a product and seeing the possibility that a product can afford you. I'm sure there were meetings yesterday. There are meetings today, there'll be meetings tomorrow where you sit down and you'll go through solutions. But we really need to get to a space where we're kind of reframing and renaming and reclaiming. So we start with the reframing piece of we need to move Mao, because people are waiting on us to figure it the hell out, and they deserve for us to get about the business of doing it. Reframing this concept of understanding that it's not just about coming up with a solution. We have to see ourselves as the solution. It's so much more than the documents and plans that we come up with. And I think if we can keep our mind on the concept of knowing that folks are waiting on us to figure it out, it'll help us through all the frustrating times to sustain the work. So at the end of the day, I implore everyone to really get about the business and understanding the impact of what we're doing. Because there are people on the other side, like me as a child or like a Betty Lou, or like many of you may have folks that, you know that need and deserve for us to figure it out.
Well, I love that you said that they're waiting, but the fact is they need it. They need it to meet them. There it also reminds me of my grandmother who would have said getting get about the business of doing it. So thank you for that. So, Dean Miller, thank you for sharing this inspiring work. What an amazing reminder for all of us to keep the impact and the mission at front and center of anything we do. So whether it's students, staff, grandparents, think about the kind of impact you can have with the right technology in hand, the jobs you can make easier, the lives you can impact and the services you could deliver faster. Thank you, Dean Miller, for being here with us this morning. What an hour we've had together. We've heard inspiring stories from customers. You've seen lots of innovation and how it's delivering impact. But we're not done yet. Please be sure to check out the campground. We've got roundtables and education sessions. Of course you have to go to Agent Force City. I think I'm probably going to sign up for that course, too. And Will, I am, is at asu. I'm going to sign up for his course. I'm getting a lot of jobs to do this week, so thank you for being here this morning. The most important thing, lace up your sneakers and get about the business of enjoying Dreamforce. Thank you for being here.
