“Alright, alright, alright!” as the famous catchphrase of actor Matthew McConaughey (a welcome fixture of Salesforce commercials) goes: Day 1 of Salesforce’s Education Summit 2025 event has kicked off!
The Cloud for Good team joined Salesforce and higher education leaders from across the world for the 2025 Education Summit’s keynote. The session focused on how colleges and universities can leverage AI—particularly AI agents like Salesforce’s Agentforce —to adapt to the changing education landscape, transform and enhance student experiences, academic efficiencies and operations, provide high-touch support and relationships that can drive success for students and staff across the education journey, and have an Agent-first approach. Let’s dive into the highlights:
1. AI Can Help Us Adapt to Change
Kelly Kitchen, VP & GM of Education, North America at Salesforce, opened the keynote by explaining how higher education institutions are doing more with less. Colleges and universities struggle to fill positions, while staff and advisors are overwhelmed by heavier workloads that reduce the time they spend with students, leading to high rates of staff overtime and burnout. In addition, institutions are under pressure to provide students and alumni with more personalized experiences, proactive support, empathic conversations, and streamlined services 24/7. To keep up and meet these demands, schools need to adapt. Kitchen posited that AI solutions like Agentforce can transform how colleges and universities adapt when integrated with a digital workforce and technology stack that supports institutional goals.
2. Agentic AI Will Transform the Education Journey
We heard from Salesforce executives Bryan Forrest, Margo Martinez, Biran Patel, Shea Lewis, and Keely Battle and Education Trailblazer about how Agents are revolutionizing the way universities are operating, including:
Improving Academic Operations
AI will change how colleges and universities operate. Agentforce can perform high-value tasks like streamlining processes or automating tasks usually undertaken by academic operations staff and advisors. As education Trailblazer and President & CEO of Unity Environmental University, Dr. Melik Peter Khoury advised, “Use AI to make your position more valuable.” By providing the specialized support that staff and advisors need for their roles and innovating how they work, Agentforce helps free up more time to interface, serve, support, and build high-touchpoint connections with students more meaningfully. Kivanc Oner, VP for Digital Transformation & CIO of UNLV’s Board of Regents, echoed this sentiment onstage, saying, “It’s all about efficiency and creating a digital workforce that helps schools focus on high-touch student support.”
Turning Data Into Applications for Recruitment and Admissions
Agents are also helping limit application entry barriers. With Agentforce agents, institutions can augment how prospective students receive information about a campus and its programs and get their questions answered on their own time. By connecting humans to data and transforming those interactions into actions, Agentforce can provide students with more seamless experiences during the recruitment and admissions stage while adding automation and personalized next steps for their recruitment teams. These movements help push applicants through the recruitment pipeline and, as a result, help universities reach (and exceed) their enrollment goals.
Transforming and Driving Student Success with Personalized Experiences and Proactive Support
AI agents shouldn’t just be seen as a tool but as a strategic asset to create more personalized and proactive student experiences while reducing the administrative burden on staff. With agentic AI driving digital transformation, a future where colleges and universities can have deeper connections with their students is possible. For example, Agentforce agents can identify and suggest relevant, personalized talking points for staff when they meet with students, including topics like what kind of support students need outside the classroom, how to prepare for graduation on time, or how to create a career path. By using AI and technology for proactive student support, institutions are “reinventing what student success in education means and achieving enrollment success and success in excellence.”
3. Salesforce is on the Cutting Edge of Technology
Fresh off the inspiring customer stories, the keynote was also an opportunity to hear about some exciting product announcements from Salesforce for the Education community. Every year, Salesforce invests BILLIONS into research and development, and our friends in the education industry are getting considerable technological enhancements.
Next-Generation Student Information System (SIS):
June 2025 Release:
- Course Registration: Search, select, and register for courses seamlessly without disconnected systems or confusion.
- Holds & Blocks: Includes business rules to help registrars comply with institutional policies and procedures.
Recruitment + Admissions
Now GA:
- Stage Management: Organize, automate, and visualize reviews by stage. Staff can define rules for each stage and get a holistic view of progress made throughout the review cycle.
- Application Scoring: Define program-specific scoring criteria so enrollment staff can more easily take the next steps and make review decisions.
Beta:
- Agentforce for Education Student Recruitment: Utilize AI agents to answer prospective students’ questions 24/7 autonomously.
June 2025 Release:
- Agentforce for Education Student Recruitment Enhancements: Capture RFIs and create qualified leads, registering prospective students for events, and start an application.
Student Success
Now GA:
- Holistic Student Insights: Visualize learners’ progress faster and take action accordingly to help students stay on track towards graduation.
Advancement & Alumni Relations
Now GA:
- Prospect Research: Transforms prospect research into an efficient and data-driven process. Enables advancement teams to understand their constituents better and predict net worth and future campus involvement through comprehensive, verified, and actionable prospect research capabilities powered by data collected over a span of time.
June 2025 Release:
- Agentforce for Education Prospect Research: Provide enhanced prospect profiling with personalized insights, identifying alumni and donors with high giving potential, finding and accessing relevant information more quickly, and utilizing insights to form engagement strategies.
The Education Summit 2025 Keynote opened our eyes to all the innovations and ways the higher education space can use AI agents and Agentforce to empower institutions and revolutionize student success and education experiences. Now that Cloud for Good is an Agentforce Partner, we can’t wait to take advantage of the upcoming Agentforce and AI innovations that Salesforce is developing for the education industry and help colleges and universities use technology to elevate education experiences. If you’re at Education Summit 2025 this week, I invite you to visit the Cloud for Good team at Booth #21 in the Campground or join us for our Roundtable conversations and Customer Sessions. If you can’t attend and are interested in learning more about agents at your institution, contact us to set up a call with one of our experts.
