AI Agents Are Becoming Every Student’s Digital Guide

Wesley Smith (00:00.608)

Ruben, thanks for joining us today.

Ruben Harris (00:03.874)
Thank you for having me.

Wesley Smith (00:05.44)
Hey, for our presence forum audience, can you tell us a little bit about your background? It’s an interesting background, and then also introduce out rival to us.

Ruben Harris (00:14.03)
So I’ll with Outrival. So Outrival creates AI agents that we call digital workers for high volume organizations to create personalized interactions with their customers. So when you think about higher education, those use cases tend to be in enrollment management, bill pay debt collection, inbound student support, and then retention. And so we are currently doing over 3 million calls a month. And the way that we got into this.

Wesley Smith (00:40.712)
wow.

Ruben Harris (00:42.274)
This world is before this, we ran an organization called Career Karma. Career Karma built its own enrollment management team of about 300 people with me and my co-founder, Timormeister. we had about two million people a month coming to us trying to get enrolled into vocational schools. So we learned everything about not just enrollment management funnels and retention, but all of the things that you need to do to serve a student when it comes to psychology.

follow-up nudges, motivations, wraparound support and things like that. before that I worked at three different startups in education, healthcare and politics. The first one wasn’t education. It was called alt school focus on pre-cise education for K th grade students. The second one was called Honor, which was a marketplace for caregivers and their families in hospitals. And then the third one was actually in politics with with Hustle, which is another reason why I’m excited about President’s Forum at Hustle. We actually

worked on bi-directional communication for text message for through text message for political campaigns. so I really learned a lot about not just communication for politics, but how to raise money for big political parties. And before that I was an investment banker for three years. And then before that I’ve been playing the cello since I was four years old. I’ve done Carnegie Hall twice and that’s a little bit about my background.

Wesley Smith (02:04.779)
We got a little bit of everything. I like I didn’t know the cello. That that’s that’s really interesting. Twice at Carnegie Hall. That’s cool.

Ruben Harris (02:08.63)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Twice at Carnegie Hall, I was a my Montessori school kid. So I learned about music through Montessori School. and my teacher, Bonnie Bull, that I started with, top violin and cello. And so yeah, I work with her, President Wolfgang Laufer, and and many other great cellists in the world.

Wesley Smith (02:25.093)
wow.

Wesley Smith (02:31.797)
So I mean, w maybe some music at an upcoming presence forum meeting. We’ll bring the cello out. that sounds good. Well, hey, you’ve made a really interesting observation. You y you made the observation that what sounds strange today is just early. Tell tell me what you mean by that, and and I reserve the right to to follow that up with with another kind of leading question. Go ahead.

Ruben Harris (02:36.403)
Yeah. I think we should do that, yeah.

Ruben Harris (02:58.538)
Yeah. I mean a lot of things that look novel in the beginning is just normal. That’s actually I I took that language actually directly from President Miller Mill Iron, where we did an interview last week and he was just talking about like what’s novel is normal. He actually gave an example of of email being introduced into the school and how a lot of people were very in against actual computers and email in the classroom, very similar to the introduction of AI, but then

Now obviously AI and computers are very normal in classrooms. I’m a student of history. I read a lot of books, a lot of biographies, and I know that we’re going through a lot of changes with AI faster than we’ve ever seen. And that quote was just a reminder that this is the same thing that you guys have seen before. And I I showed that picture of people in a boardroom where we gotta not we gotta change and and stop hoping that our

our strategy of of hoping that a the internet’s gonna go away is gonna be is gonna work. You gotta kinda like sit there and and accept that the internet is here, AI is here, AI agents are here. So what are we gonna do with them to empower our employees better and also to empower our students better? And if we’re gonna help our future leaders of the world, they’re going to need to be using AI agents in the workplace. And so

Not everybody in the workplace is using AI agents yet, but from my perspective there will be more AI agents than humans on the planet and more AI agents in the workforce than humans on the planet and we have to figure out how to work together with them.

Wesley Smith (04:36.361)
Yeah, yeah, really interesting. Okay. So so my question is, so str it’s it’s the new normal, right? Like to see see things that are looking very novel, very strange. What what in higher education do you think looks kind of interesting now that in, you know, two years will be like super mainstream?

Ruben Harris (04:43.361)
Uh-huh, huh.

Uh-huh.

Ruben Harris (04:58.776)
So part of the reason why I’m very excited about the present form is you all are the you all serve the the largest number of students. And it’s it’s not a lot of people when they think about schools that have large numbers of students, they usually think for profits, but present form is obviously a lot of nonprofits. You have schools like Mommy Day that we work with and and many other schools like that. What what I think is is interesting about that is whenever I talk to a small school, I actually

Tell them they actually don’t need to work without Rival because they have enough humans to personally serve all of their students when they reach out to them or when they’re reaching out to the student, right? If you’re doing with the if you’re dealing with a large organization, even if you have ten thousand employees and you have a hundred thousand students or in some cases two hundred or three hundred thousand students, it’s impossible for a human to reach out to that many people, especially when you have to touch them at least.

five plus times because these are working adults. these aren’t just people that are going there for four years that there’s an online component. So these people are are are I’m gonna use another quote that that Mark Melion uses. He calls them anders. These are people that are parents and online students. These are people that are actually doing things and so they need some kind of personalized interaction. So what I think is going to be normalized is every student is going to be able to have

some type of a digital worker or an AI agent that not only guides them from inquiry or prospect into enrollment, but also stays with them throughout their entire school experience through graduation. But that digital worker is a collaboration partner or a co-intelligence with your human staff and they’ll always be able to route the student to the right human at the right time in your organization. And when they graduate from the school,

Wesley Smith (06:50.005)
Right.

Ruben Harris (06:55.756)
that student can still reach out to their AI agent that was with them from the beginning. And that AI agent can connect them with the right human at the right time at the school because humans sometimes leave organizations. Right. And so that’s gonna be normalized for sure.

Wesley Smith (07:12.543)
Yeah, that’s interesting. I I mean that’s the first time I’ve heard that articulated. I I I’ve heard a lot about AI agents and you know, we’re we’re gonna be using you know, to decrease friction in the enrollment process or others. But I like that concept of having your own personal, almost like liaison to the institution that can that can then route you to whether it’s, you know,

Ruben Harris (07:14.658)
Yeah. Yeah.

Wesley Smith (07:39.445)
financial aid help or or admissions help or academic help or alumni support or or whatever. That’s that’s a cool vision.

Ruben Harris (07:48.111)
Think I think on top of it too, if you think about the the increasing focus on what is the purpose of education, people are thinking about cost. Some people will say, it’s just to make a better student, a better person, community, find your wife, whatever, right? Some people will say going to school and paying all that money is to get a job that pays you more than what you had to pay in tuition, right? And so from an outcomes perspective, I think it’s currently very difficult to know.

where all of your alumni goes from a employment perspective in the future. But if they have a relationship with their digital worker or their AI agent, you can probably get more accurate and up-to-date employment information in the future from that digital worker. And if you think about the whole circle of life, after you get a skill and you get into a job, you at some point are probably going to need more education. So that digital worker can also route you to the right.

person or the right course that you might need in the future as well.

Wesley Smith (08:49.757)
Especially today. I mean, with with the the landscape in the work world changing so quickly, you’ll have to reskill, you’ll have to upskill, you’ll have to I mean, you just have to be resilient. You have to be able to, you know, change when things change. And things are changing so much faster. The cycle of change is coming so much faster that that makes a lot of sense that this this, you know, liaison could also help you upskill, reskill, you know, to whatever whatever the workforce dictates.

Ruben Harris (08:58.403)
Mm-hmm.

Ruben Harris (09:17.858)
Yeah. My my favorite book that ties to your liaison analogy is called Cointelligence by Ethan Mollock. He’s a professor at Wharton. It’s a very short book, but it just gives you the framework and the mindset for how to think about these digital workers. It’s almost like your staff got promoted. I mean several of the people in the president’s forum already have lots of humans. Sometimes a third or two thirds of their whole staff is dedicated to the phones. But if you think about

What are they doing on the phones? A lot of it is waiting for people to pick up the phone, right? So here’s another thing to think about that’s going to be normalized. Right now in the higher ed, there are certain schools that are best in class at speed to lead, right? They have the best humans that are can reach out immediately when somebody fills out a form. I actually think that that capability is going to be normalized and every school is going to be able to do that with AI agents and digital work.

So what’s gonna make you different? It’s gonna be that speed to meaningful conversation where the digital worker might be able to reach out to the to the lead immediately and then route it to the right human in a certain kind of way. Right. So everybody’s served in a different way. You got everybody’s providing education, very similar to a restaurant, right? If you you everybody has food, but what makes everything different is the service. And what that’s also gonna do is gonna increase the quality of life.

for the employee. Call centers in general at schools have high churn rates. We all know this, right? Because they’re smiling and dialing. And sometimes if you’re dealing with Bill Pay, people are hanging up the phone on you, right? But if I can only talk to people that want to talk to me and the digital worker can talk to the people that aren’t ready to talk to me, how do we think about lead scoring and high intent and low intent and medium intent?

Wesley Smith (10:52.831)
Right. Yeah.

Wesley Smith (10:59.209)
Yeah, yeah.

Ruben Harris (11:13.602)
The digital workers can help you identify who’s ready and who’s not. And then the humans can really love their job and actually retain better. You don’t have to deal with turnover and retraining so much.

Wesley Smith (11:22.847)
Yeah, that makes sense to me. That makes sense. So you know, we’re talking about a really exciting future and you’re working with a lot of higher ed institutions. And I’m curious for your insight on what what kind of distinguishes, in your opinion, some some leaders who are cutting edge and that are, you know, qu early adopters and seeing good results versus those who who aren’t so much. Is there anything within, you know, leadership that you see that you could say, I

Ruben Harris (11:32.044)
Yeah.

Wesley Smith (11:52.649)
I think I I think that I think that that person is doing something right.

Ruben Harris (11:57.635)
I really love that question. Cause at first I was thinking you were asking me what am I doing different? But I like that you’re asking what are leaders doing different. Okay. Number one, if a school knows their numbers code, that’s great. You’d be surprised how many schools do not know their numbers. Number two, do you have an outbound call motion, whether that’s in house or through a third party call center through

a BPO or some offshore capability. That’s number two. Number three, what are your strategic priorities that you’re trying to move right now? So the issue with a lot of AI agents in production is that it’s usually focused on time saving, productivity, making people more efficient. Those things are great. The problem with it is as a leader, you spend a lot of time

Wesley Smith (12:28.416)
Mm-hmm.

Ruben Harris (12:56.162)
Setting up a pilot, investing a lot of money. And then it takes you a long time to know whether it worked or not. What’s really cool about a use case, let’s just use enrollment as an example, or even bill pay debt collection as an example, is you can see whether that worked in a day or a week. Right? So, so and so very quick feedback. And so you want to have the dashboards.

Wesley Smith (13:17.417)
Yeah. It’s pr pretty quick feedback.

Ruben Harris (13:24.172)
And the metrics to be able to see not only how your metrics are moving, right? But you also want to be able to see all the other metrics, like what is the effect of your dial attempts? How how what what’s more effective from a time of day perspective? Are you doing A B tests with male or female voices? One of our schools that we work with, Penn Foster, they’re doing over 50 experiments to really see what serves the student in the best way.

So the long story short is we we suggest that you create a pilot. The best leaders create pilots, but we we time box it. So it’ll either be 30 or 90 days. So we call it an internship for digital worker. And and student and higher ed leaders are familiar with internships, right? What do you do with an intern? You give them a job, you give them a job description. Don’t create a one-size-fits-all agent. Give the agent a job description, focus on the metrics.

If the metrics moved, great. Bring on that digital worker as a full time member of your team and add it as a member of your of your staff. It could do the work of 10 people augmenting the work of 100. Awesome. If it doesn’t work, don’t hire the the digital worker full time, but make it very outcomes based. And ideally, and I know people don’t always like talking about money in higher ed, it’s something that should make you money. So the best leaders that I’ve seen, the pilot is structured in a way.

Wesley Smith (14:35.445)
Right.

Ruben Harris (14:52.77)
where it actually makes you more money than you paid and it’s short and it is set up in a use case where you can deploy it at scale where maybe in the pilot phase it might make you hundreds of thousands of dollars. And s in our case, we’ve seen some p pilots make millions of dollars in thirty to ninety days. I’m talking about four million plus. And then if you deploy it at scale, you could actually make tens and even eventually hundreds of millions of dollars that goes back into reinvesting

Wesley Smith (15:13.887)
Wow. Yeah.

Ruben Harris (15:22.7)
and serving students and empowering teachers.

Wesley Smith (15:24.917)
Yeah, I love I love that last portion that that it it it’s really about reinvesting the the capital into more useful in into more useful and probably human-centered activities, right? It goes back into personalized education and instruction. You can ha you can you can utilize your your personnel in more effective ways because you’re not utilizing you know, humans to do

wrote tasks or tasks that that that a computer can do for you.

Ruben Harris (15:58.151)
I’m going give another analogy for the AI agent that’s it’s kind of stealing a little thunder for the interview that I did with with Mark, but he said that higher ed has always used AI agents. And he gives an example of writing a book. he’s written a lot of books and articles. And as a grad student, he worked with an author, let’s call him Wesley, right? And the grad students put all the material together and then the book was published. And great. That was awesome. Guess what the grad students were?

Wesley Smith (16:27.659)
They were yeah. Yeah. Sure.

Ruben Harris (16:27.682)
They were the AI agents for Wesley, the author, right? So today now the grad students can have AI agents, the professors could have AI agents, and they could all work together. So use that analogy in your head, going back to like going being a student of history, it’s actually not novel. Like history, you know, and the future and the present, they all rhyme together. And then not there’s also the that’s nothing’s original. So what sounds strange is just early. You j and you just haven’t really picked up that it’s it’s familiar actually.

Wesley Smith (16:56.971)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, great conversation. I I wanna conclude with the last question, you know, you’re new member of the forum. We we’re we’re glad to have you. tell us a little bit about what you think we can accomplish together. What what can the forum and outrival do that will improve education?

Ruben Harris (17:16.738)
Well, thank you for for inviting us to be a member of the President of Forum. We are true believers that you move at the speed of your relationships. And you I’m not gonna say the cliche quote about going farther together, but you you know the importance of collaboration. but I I did say the quote pretty much. But the the reason why I’m excited about the president of forum is not just because of the collaboration and the action items that you take, but

that the group collectively is is speaking out to people to try to teach people to learn. You all are clearly focused on content like we are. Part of the reason why our Rival created the the new normal podcast is because a lot of people started asking us questions like what you’re asking me now. What are you seeing from other leaders and what are they doing? So we would do a lot of customer references, a lot of introductions, but a lot of those customers never really had the time. And so presence form is great because we’re creating content together.

We’re sharing stories. It’s not a a commercial sale. We’re not trying to do do vendor stuff. We’re trying to educate the community and serve people. and and then you all don’t don’t just do things virtually, you all do things in person as well. And so I am very excited to to collaborate in that regard and yeah, help other people follow the examples of the leaders here to hopefully

prepare the future of leaders of the world. And last thing that I’ll say, I take it very personally because I think that there’s a cost to not doing things. Right. Yes, our schools have been around for thousands of years and there’s over four thousand schools in in the co in in the w out here. And if they don’t do things, not only are students going to be at a disadvantage, I think that schools some schools will shut down. and I think that there’s a way to run schools sustainably, leverage technology and

Wesley Smith (18:52.394)
Right.

Ruben Harris (19:12.487)
I am going to do my best to make sure that nobody has to shut down.

Wesley Smith (19:17.225)
Hey, now you’re on now you’re on Presence Forum talking points where you’re talking about, hey, we need to use technology, leverage it, we need to decrease costs with it, make it more sustainable, make it a better return for all of our students, because at the end of the day, that’s what the Presidents Forum’s all about is is driving outcomes for students and with with the use of technology. We call it accountable innovation at the the presence forum. We you know.

Ruben Harris (19:20.918)
Mm.

Wesley Smith (19:41.917)
Innovation, you know, for innovation’s sake isn’t necessarily what we’re pursuing. We’re we want to see innovation that drives better student experience. It’s lower costs and better outcomes. So that’s what we’re working on together.

Ruben Harris (19:54.366)
That’s it. Let’s do it together. And thanks again for having me on the present forum and let me know how how else I can help.

Wesley Smith (20:02.186)
You got it. Thanks, Ruben. Thanks for joining.

Ruben Harris (20:04.313)
No.