DRUID Talks Season 2 Ep#6: The Secret to Higher Education Excellence Using Intelligent Automation

Join us for a captivating episode of DRUID Talks, where host Kieran Gilmurray sits down with Bryant Richards, the pioneering mind behind Nichols College's Centre for Intelligent Process Automation (CIPA). As the US education market continues to skyrocket, Richards is at the forefront, equipping students with the digital prowess essential for today's competitive landscape.

Kieran Gilmurray:

Let me introduce everyone to Druid Talk Series 2, where we'll meet experts in AI, Generative AI, Robotic Process Automation, Intelligent Automation, and conversational AI space. Today, we talk about the secret to higher education excellence using intelligent Automation with Bryant Richards. According to a report published by Facts and Figures, the US education market was worth a massive U.S. dollar 1.4 trillion in 2021 and is predicted to grow to 3.2 US trillion dollars by 20-30. That's an astonishing number.

Brian Richards is the Founder and Director of Nichols's Collage hugely successful Centre for Intelligent Process Automation, A venture set up to give college students the training and RPA in Intelligent Automation, Process Mapping, and Business Analysis that they need to have the digital skills that are required to cope in the real world. He is an associate professor speaker on finance, audit, and automation and an expert in intelligent automation technologies and the US higher education sector. Bryant, welcome to Druid Talks.

Bryant Richards:

Thanks, Karen. It's great to be here.

Kieran Gilmurray:

To set the scene a little bit, Bryant, would you mind introducing yourself and telling the audience what you're currently doing, Sir?

Bryant Richards:

Yeah, I'd be happy to do sure. So I have spent 20 plus years in the industry in accounting and finance, working roles primarily in internal audit up to executive level roles within that. After that, I followed my passion for developing and training too. I graduated to higher Ed here at Nichols College. It's a small Business School outside of Worcester, MA that really focuses on providing students exponential learning and the skills that they need to be successful in their careers in that space.

I'm an associate professor of accounting and finance. I've spent the last five years sort of evaluating what's going to happen with accounting especially and have found that there's a really critical technology component that is coming that is here, but that is missed within higher education and within curriculums. In response to this gap, I, with the support of a number of trustees and actually, dare I say the nudging from a number of our trustees, launched the Center for Intelligence Process Automation aimed at providing consulting, research, and training to our students especially and to our greater community to support the skills gap that we noticed. In addition to that, I'm actually pursuing my Ph.D. in Accounting at the University of Scranton. My focus, to no surprise, is on internal audit and accounting and the implications of emerging technology.

Kieran Gilmurray:

Wow, you are not bored. Let's just say you are not bored. Brian, let's dive in a little bit.

Would you tell us a little bit more about the US Higher Education sector, and is there, or is there not, a reluctance to adopt new tech in US colleges or universities, or do they welcome it with open arms?

Bryant Richards:

Sure. Tough question as it's framed, but let me give you some insights that I think will help answer that question a little bit. I think the first you've already set up the stage. It's a huge marketplace. It's a hugely important industry, and it's an old industry, but it also has a significant amount of variation throughout it.

There are a lot of small schools like us, there are a lot of large schools, and we provide different roles to different demographics. What makes this really compelling and interesting, too, is that the goal of this industry and the focus has always been knowledge creation and dissemination in various ways, to put simply. And if you look at the industry on the whole, it's actually really good at it, and we're really hard on ourselves to be better, but it's really good at that particular thing we're approaching what we call a demographic Cliff in 2025. It's right around the corner. We've been experiencing a shrinking population of students coming to schools, at least especially in the United States and in different territories.

And as a result, when you do the math, and many have, we're finding that consolidation of sorts is definitely required within the industry. Now, the last thing I'd like to add to this is that I think a really important point is we're good at some things that I mentioned. No one ever ran a school saying we are going to be operationally excellent and efficient. We will have the best back office procedures and the best technologically advanced type of ways of conducting business. When you hear that, hopefully, you know you can start seeing how the word reluctant may not necessarily fit.

You might think to yourself, well, it's not that they're reluctant. They would love technology solutions, but we don't usually have the skills, the mindset, the the culture to know how to embrace these things as an organization and implement them successfully. What you will find is that in pockets especially, whether it's faculty-led or pilot-led, there are a lot of folks doing really amazing things within higher education on this stuff

Kieran Gilmurray:

Do you think, in general though, the US Education sector would benefit from Intelligent automation, generative AI, and conversational AI? Or are these nice to have, and there's a different, better way?

Bryant Richards:

Yes, two reasons. One, it's already well set up. We are not efficient, and if you were looking at any organization, you would find that higher education, like some of these other older, slowly moving organizations, there's just a lot of opportunity to eliminate waste, to improve, to minimize errors, to improve responsivity. Every one of the use cases within these types of technologies that have already been proven out would work and would be plugged and play very effectively if you could get the organization to deploy it 100% successfully. This would be a savior to many organizations in many ways, especially in light of the great resignation where many folks are switching jobs and keeping talent as harder.

In addition to that, what you're going to find is if you look at the educational component of some of these technologies, we at Nichols College have really shocked ourselves. One of the reasons we led with the center was that teaching with these tools is an exponential way to get business students and frankly, other students an experience and knowledge that we couldn't do in other methods. And then finally, what we're seeing with especially just conversational AI is as much as faculty, we try to sort of be everything to every student, and we try to be as flexible as we can. There's a concept of universal design that is impossible to follow as a human being. You can't be everything to every student and match your activities with their learning style.

But AI can learn to do that, or AI can be a tool to do that. We just started a number of us, some piloting the introduction of conversational AI in a lot of our classes as a supplement resource, as a guide to enhance critical thinking skills and as a research tool. We believe strongly that as time goes on, we can get the students to learn better because it gives some of the students a tool that fills in a gap that we couldn't.

Kieran Gilmurray:

Oh wow, wow. Almost like personalized education. Almost a moment ago you went, you said there are use cases.

What AI use cases exist in the higher education space?

Bryant Richards:

Sure. So I want to start with, you know, there are some tried and true ones regarding the analysis of data, right? So, if we're looking at why our students succeed, who succeeds? Who should we recruit, and where should we recruit from? If you look at the pipeline of their most, I think one of the most important things we do is student success.

Analyzing the data historically of all the people who've come here, where they've come from, and maybe what their, you know, demographics were, how they did in high school, or you know, and then really trying to figure out which students we're best suited for. How do we get the best results, and how do we make sure we find more of those students or learn about how to help maybe the other students who we're not so successful with? I mean, that's a use case that's already started in many ways. I think we could be a lot better at that, and I think we really need AI to dig into that data. I don't think a person can ask all the questions in time to get those answers. I think that's a really tried and true one in terms of artificial intelligence.

Kieran Gilmurray:

What about examples of AI or automation that you or the students have implemented inside of Nichols or outside of Nichols, and what were the key things that you learned during that?

Bryant Richards:

Oh, sure. So, it's funny. One of the key things we've learned just to start is this: developing the solution is actually really easy. There are use cases out there that are just astoundingly easy. And I'll give you an example. We have a situation where there are a number of utility bills that come in based on every piece of property we have. Somebody has to punch them into an Excel file to keep track of them, assess them, and make sure that: one, they're right; two, that we understand the trends; and three, we can, you know, manage our utilities in an efficient way.

Just using Power Automate, we were able to collect all of those utility bills in different forms, and then we were able to pull, in some cases, invoices as they came in, scanned into the Artificial Intelligence builder within the Power Automate environment, and it automatically. We taught it to recognize the invoices automatically, and now all the data can come in, and all of the data can automatically be read and punched into an Excel and then visualized using a dashboard that dynamically updates, and to be honest, that solution is fairly easy to develop, and other sorts of related solutions around clicking or collecting information or formatting information which exists throughout purchasing and registration and frankly every click we make throughout this school financials, things like that.

Kieran Gilmurray:

Wow. Because that's the thing. I think people from the outside, you know, someone who doesn't know automation, be thinking that's quite complex. You've described it as a matter of fact. Where does it sit on the chain there? Complex to do, easy to do?

Bryant Richards:

I can very quickly teach a first-year student how to do that in a couple of weeks.

Kieran Gilmurray:

It can show you what a business person could do as well.

Bryant Richards:

They could very easily, without deep understanding, create the solution. They could create it, and it would probably take, you know, some of my folks, it might take 40 hours to build up the solution I just explained, maybe 80 depending on the complexity of the inputs coming in, which is really you've got to keep building to kind of match those inputs a little bit. Deployment is where it's actually really challenging. You know, teaching a student how to have the experience to deploy and implement means you have to be comfortable with change management. You have to be comfortable with project management, and you need buy-in from certain folks, and you need to start building projects around that.

And although we work with some folks who are, dare I say, execution-oriented in certain departments, some departments aren't really well set up to handle that. So even though you can build the solution, and it sounds easy, the deployment can be challenging. It really can. That's the hard part.

Kieran Gilmurray:

The bit that's the bit they say, isn't it? Change management is absolutely key. If we go back a little bit, you mentioned earlier on conversational AI. Because you mentioned one example, but where can it fit? What can you actually do with that tech?

Do you think conversational AI is a technology that can really work? Does it fit?

Bryant Richards:

I love it. My head's exploding with use cases as I keep digging it, digging into this. This stuff's blowing my mind. Yeah, so wow. So, let me start with this. I was in class the other day, and it was a small class, and it's actually an automation class. And I was teaching the students how to do governance, RPA. So we're talking about that. And so, as we're talking in class, I said, OK, you need to come up with a framework that you feel comfortable using to evaluate some companies. And I said, why don't you sit for 10 minutes with the four of you and compare your thoughts and try to get a high-level framework that you all feel can work for you. Which is a complex thing for an undergrad, you know, to get at. But they've done a lot of research.

And while they did that, I went on to ChatGPT and I asked ChatGPT to create two different cases. And 10 minutes later, I had two separate companies with great detail for which they could now apply for their presentation. 10 minutes to build 2 cases that were literally 3 pages long, full of detail. I had quotes, I had insights, I had, you know, key performance indicators, estimated statistics. I mean, I would have spent hours online digging for that. And all that was just 10 minutes in class.

Kieran Gilmurray:

But that's lovely in so many ways. You know, the augmentation, not the replacement of educators. You know the fact that they didn't have to go away and spend 6 months getting all that research data. Now they can get on with the real work for one of a better phrase. 

What advice would you give higher education institutes thinking about starting their digital journey?

Bryant Richards:

Number one, stop thinking and start. Just do it. Start somewhere you have to start. It might be the hardest thing if you can't figure out how to start. Just go small. Start somewhere. I think you'll find that there are folks who can do something you can. You need to start building up a new collective, dare I say, cultural perspective and understanding of what this is. You know, the more the institution has awareness and understanding, the easier it will be to deploy as time goes on, and every organization has different risks, challenges, and strengths. And so some might actually be able to invest like a lot of organizations did and have consultants come in and, you know, build out some streams for them.

What we did was we built from our students up and our faculty, and so now we have the students almost leading and the smartest, some of the smartest folks outside of the IT department. And these are, in fact, our students who are going in and helping some of the athletics teams, with small automation, they're going to classes doing demonstrations. They're literally using automation to do research and other things to make their lives easier and, frankly, their time better spent. So definitely start, and if you have to, start small.

Kieran Gilmurray:

Oh, really? Like that? I really like that in so many ways that it goes back to the experiential component of education learning as well. The faculties have raw materials in the students; the students need skills that prepare them for the digital world, and the combination of the two sounds like a really fantastic combination. I'm surprised more don't jump on that. 

Bryant Richards:

I agree. I've spoken with a lot of schools. I guess it's a little harder to start something like this than I thought. And we get a lot of support from the top all the way down South. Anything in higher education really requires layers and layers of support, and I'll insist that there are so many people along the way who ensured that this was successful for us, including the students.

So, if you think about how many stakeholders it involves, I think that alignment is sort of the magic we brought, right? We had everybody, everybody wanted to do this, and then that's, I don't know, you get 20 people in a room, 20 different stakeholders, good luck getting them all to check that box, I think, yeah, 100%. But I will tell you this: to no surprise, the best thing we do is what we do for our students. And you know, although we have automation to talk about interesting stories and some new, you know, tools that make us a little more efficient. You might not be surprised to find out that our students are very marketable once they have these skills, and they really enjoy taking offers from multiple companies when they graduate

Kieran Gilmurray:

Just where I needed to be as a graduate. Instead, I tried to hunt for my first job. And what about the companies themselves? You were talking about those just as you finished the sentence there.

What advice would you give them to get the best ROI from conversational AI and intelligent automation?

Bryant Richards:

Wow. I, you know, my mind depends on the company in some cases, but use cases matter. The neat thing is there are a lot of folks working on this, and my mind always goes to, and the research always goes too. It might be fun to build, it might be great to play around and explore things, and many folks start that way. But given the amount of collective knowledge we have not only in the research but in the industry right now, there are tried and true use cases that really matter.

They get a huge return on investments. The cake is baked. We know how to be successful with them. We don't have to be the first to be there. Pick those, pick one of those, get your wins, and start with that. I mean, you can be conservative all you want and just just do those types of things. I think you'll find that there's a really low-risk approach to this that has high rewards without investing too much in various types of capital.

Kieran Gilmurray:

And I think that is such a true statement because companies sometimes worry about where to begin and what they'll do next. I hope they think about what to do next. But the vendors have all these things worked out over the last 8 to 10 years. There may actually be more that you do. Once you've implemented and got that flywheel, start to spin that you can actually find.

Bryant Richards:

I love, I love that Kieran. And if I can just follow up on that. One of the most impactful things we've seen with everyone we've talked to in the last five years or shown things to or do demonstrations of work. It always comes down to, once they see something, they always say the next thing, which is, "Hey, could you do or could this do right? And so just getting out there and again starting that journey, you'll learn, and the people in the industry are really smart at their industries, right? They're not really sure how this fits yet, but seeing it all of a sudden, they start taking ownership of it, and then they can start adapting it to their organization as it makes a lot more sense for them.

Kieran Gilmurray:

I love the way they do that. I absolutely love that that light bulb moment that just gets brighter and brighter and brighter.

If people want to find out a little bit more about you and the fantastic work that CIPA is doing? How did they do so?

Bryant Richards:

Yeah, sure. So, I'm always available on LinkedIn. I love new connections, especially in this space. I love sharing and learning. So please, Bryant Richards at LinkedIn (linkedin.com/in/bryantrichards/). I think I'm the only Bryant Richards out there, so I might be pretty easy to find. Of course, I'm the only Bryant Richards at Nichols College. If you're looking for more information on the Center for Intelligence Process Automation, there is a website out there with a lot of news that kind of gives you a sense of what students have been working on. And that's at cipa.nichols.edu.

Kieran Gilmurray:

Fantastic, Sir. We'll put that in the show notes as well. Bryant. I'm inspired. If only I had that same educational background when I was a student. Coming out was real, practical conversational AI, robotic process automation, intelligent automation, process mining, change management, and business experience. I don't know. Worth a fortune. It's no wonder your students are in high demand, and I suspect you have a little more than something to do about that as well. Knowing you and knowing the CIPA program and knowing Nichols College as well, Bryant, that was a tour de force when it comes to higher education and the benefits of all of those intelligent automation technologies.

Thank you, Sir. I really appreciate that.

Bryant Richards:

Thank you, Karen. Thank you for your kind words. Appreciate it.

Kieran Gilmurray:

Have a great day, everyone.

The next episode of DRUID Talks is scheduled for the 31st of January. Subscribe to be notified at https://druidai.com/talks.