Charles Sturt University has deployed an after-hours chatbot capable of showing empathy rather just giving than wooden responses when helping students.
Customer experience lead Michael Buttsworth told iTnews that the university has had chatbots before, but its newest one – named ‘Charlie’ – is the first agentic AI bot able converse with students rather than just regurgitate dry scripted responses and links to information resources.
“I found our traditional chat[bot] to be pretty rigid. There’s no empathy, you could ask the most horrific question and it’ll [respond] ‘here’s an article’, Buttsworth told iTnews.
Buttsworth said that the university hoped that Charlie would have more empathetic features built into its chat functionality in the future.
Charlie has been accessible to CSU’s staff and students since September.
In addition to helping enrolled students seek extensions and withdraw from studies, Charlie can help them apply for course credit from prior learning and course selection.
Charlie doesn’t currently interface with student data and is focused on being conversational at the moment, Buttsworth said.
Buttsworth said that he’d like to get Charlie to a point where it incorporates customer data, alleviating the need for the bot to ask some questions, as it’ll be able to pull information from specific student-related records.
However, at the moment, he said, the tool is intended to be risk-free”.
The concept for Charlie was spurred by CSU’s need to offer support services to students outside business hours.
Buttsworth said that most students learn throughout the day and have jobs. They study at night when support is most difficult to reach, he said.
Charlie is also the first chatbot the university has deployed on the Genesys platform, which the university uses for its customer support and management systems.
The university’s legacy chatbot continues to operate, responding to queries that the agentic one is yet to be equipped to respond to, Buttsworth said.
The chatbot was built with Genesys AI Guides feature, which is designed to deliver virtual agents without code.
Using this system, Buttsworth said that Charlie required four weeks of testing to establish confidence and trust in the chatbot, but its creation period took hours.
“We’ve gone from offering zero percent of online chat after hours to 50 percent of our chats [being] after hours,” Buttsworth said.
The university’s ultimate goal is to deliver an all-in-one chatbot service for students at the university, with a self-service option in our customers’ channel of choice, Buttsworth said.
“That’s certainly where we’re focusing our attention in 2026,” he said.
The university will wait for an overhaul of its student management system, scheduled to be completed October 2026 before deploying some tools
“We will probably wait until then for some things simply because we don’t want to redo it again in 12 months time.”