Begin with the workflow vocabulary
Student service requests, Course information access, Curriculum knowledge review each have distinct inputs and review points. A shared vocabulary should explain what the core entities—Course, Program, Published policy, Service enquiry—mean and how they relate. A model cannot repair conflicting business definitions just by receiving a longer prompt.
Preserve context that changes the answer
Version published catalogs, identify the academic period, preserve policy authority, and exclude restricted records from public retrieval. Record the source authority and the conditions under which information applies. An answer can be fluent and still be wrong because it used the wrong entity relationship, document version, unit, or time period.
Make evidence a product feature
Student-services staff answer recurring procedural questions using catalogs and policy documents that change between academic periods. The user experience should expose the evidence behind a proposed output and make uncertainty visible. Provide source links, relevant dates, and a clear distinction between observed records and model-produced interpretation.
Give agents a bounded responsibility
Find published information and draft responses to routine service questions. Define this responsibility with explicit completion criteria and a small tool set. Keep retrieval, draft preparation, and record-changing actions separate in the permission model. An agent’s ability to suggest a next step does not imply authority to execute it.
Test the difficult cases first
Include conflicting identifiers, missing evidence, obsolete documents, and restricted records in evaluation. Proposed measures include correct-period retrieval, citation accuracy, public/restricted separation, and staff correction frequency. Also test whether reviewers can understand and correct an output without reconstructing the whole task themselves.
Keep the ownership model visible
Admissions, grading, eligibility, and interventions remain human decisions. Data stewards resolve source meaning and quality, platform teams operate access and reliability, and workflow owners accept the business behavior. Treat these responsibilities as part of the architecture rather than a handover note.
Architecture takeaway
Version published catalogs, identify the academic period, preserve policy authority, and exclude restricted records from public retrieval. A useful AI experience preserves this context through ingestion, retrieval, generation, and review.