Unity Environmental University Taps Agentforce to Scale Student Recruitment and Enhance Enrollment Experiences

With Salesforce Education Cloud and Agentforce, Unity aims to increase the number of students enrolled from 10,000 to 50,000 in five years

Implementing Agentforce is expected to help Unity save $800 in staff resource time for every request for information made via their website

Salesforce and Unity Environmental University today announced that the university is expanding its use of Salesforce to include Agentforce, a new layer on the Salesforce Platform that enables organizations to build and deploy autonomous AI agents. Unity, a private university specializing in environmental science-based education with climate-ready degrees including Sustainable Horticulture, Environmental Engineering, and Climate-Ready Business, will leverage Agentforce agents within the flow of work in Education Cloud to scale student recruitment, more effectively engage students during enrollment, and improve access to higher education.

The challenge: Unity has students in every U.S. state and territory and is creating an education model that opens doors to environmental science-focused learning worldwide. Having grown from 500 to 10,000 enrolled students since 2012, with the help of Education Cloud, Unity now aims to reach 50,000 enrolled students by 2030. However, the university’s staff is increasingly challenged to maintain their high level of service, especially in meeting enrollment goals. And time matters – prospective students cannot spend hours, weeks, or more waiting for information and navigating the admissions process. 

The solution: With Agentforce, Unity can scale staff resources to manage the increased volume of students. Agentforce goes beyond chatbots and copilots, using advanced reasoning abilities to make decisions and take action, like helping students through the application process. Agentforce doesn’t depend on human engagement to get work done — these agents can be triggered by changes in data, business rules, pre-built automations, or signals via API calls from other systems. Unity’s AI agents will be grounded in the university’s unique data and metadata — such as previous student interactions, web engagement data, enrollment information, knowledge articles, and other institutional data — to personalize every interaction while keeping trust and privacy at the center of every engagement.

Go deeper: With Education Cloud as its primary CRM and student information system, Unity has a single platform that brings together all of its data — from inquiry, application, and registration information to academic programs and degree requirements — to provide staff with a full view of their students. Education Cloud also serves as Unity’s main student interface, helping manage all aspects of student success and academic advising, as well as the entire application process. 

Unity will initially deploy Agentforce to assist with the recruitment and enrollment process, focusing on resource-intensive tasks like the Request for Information (RFI) process, helping to answer prospective students’ questions about the university and its programs 24/7, as well as guiding them through the application process. Eventually, Agentforce will be used to enhance support throughout the entire student lifecycle. With Agentforce and Education Cloud, Unity can:

• Enhance Enrollment Conversion: Unity will use Agentforce to create a more efficient experience for students seeking information, applying, and enrolling. For example, prospective students will interact with student recruitment agents on the website, instantly receiving answers to their questions about the university, and in many cases, helping them start their application process in near real time. This will significantly reduce the time between an inquiry and a response, and ultimately help increase enrollment conversions.
• Expand Access for Learners: By making information and assistance more accessible through always-on Agentforce agents, Unity will help reduce barriers to entry for first-generation students, nontraditional learners, adult students, and distance learners.
• Scale Staff Resourcing: With Agentforce handling routine inquiries and tasks, staff will be able to focus their time on impactful, strategic initiatives such as personalized student support, outreach, and program development. But when human escalation is needed, hand-offs are seamless, with the full context of interactions instantly shared with a recruitment officer, or other support staff. 
• Simplify Enrollment and Registration: Looking ahead, Agentforce will be able to use all of the data centralized in Education Cloud to handle a broad spectrum of tasks, such as course registration, degree planning, advisory, and other essential student services. Agentforce will be able to respond dynamically to student questions around critical topics like financial aid and class registration to provide immediate, personalized assistance to Unity students at every stage of their journey, around the clock. For example, a student advisory agent will be able to assist with degree planning by recommending next-best course selections based on a student’s major and help them add or drop classes.

Salesforce perspective: “Recruitment has never been more important for universities than it is today, and every institution needs to be rethinking how they engage and support prospective students. AI agents help Unity augment the ability of staff to provide personalized and efficient student support and scale its workforce to meet the university’s new enrollment goals, all while lowering costs. By leveraging Agentforce and Education Cloud, Unity Environmental University will now be able to better support prospective students faster than ever before while increasing accessibility, improving student support, and bolstering enrollment.” ‌— Margo Martinez, VP & GM, Education 

By leveraging Agentforce and Education Cloud, Unity Environmental University will now be able to better support prospective students faster than ever before while increasing accessibility, improving student support, and bolstering enrollment.

Margo Martinez, VP & GM, Education

Unity perspective: “With Agentforce and Education Cloud, we will completely reimagine the recruitment and enrollment processes at Unity Environmental University. Instead of traditional paper forms or even chatbots, our students will soon have the convenience of interacting with an autonomous recruitment agent directly on our website, which will offer personalized support around the college application process.” – Dr. Melik Khoury, President & CEO, Unity Environmental University

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