From virtual learning tutor to international student orientation: AI agents in universities

Artificial intelligence is entering Italian universities, marking the transition from experimentation to strategic leverage and presenting universities with a decisive challenge: transforming AI into a safe and functional tool to serve the activities of lecturers, students and administrative staff.
Students are adopting it extensively to study (89%), with growing interest in customised virtual tutors and support for teaching activities. However, by 2025, only 28% of Italian teachers have received adequate training in the use of AI, and around one third have never heard of advanced tools such as Large Language Models (LLM).
This skills gap makes it necessary to put in place structured solutions to accompany teachers, students and universities in the conscious and safe adoption of AI.

In this context, the Italian company specialising in conversational artificial intelligence, Memori, with its AIsuru platform - brought to universities by Ex Machina Italia, a company specialising in the development of artificial intelligence solutions for public administration, universities and companies - supports universities in the design and implementation of customised conversational agents, integrated into the processes and IT ecosystems of each university, enabling the use of artificial intelligence as an operational and training tool, to support student orientation, teaching, research, regulatory updating and administrative processes.
"With AIsuru, we want to make artificial intelligence a concrete and operational tool in Italian universities: not a theoretical experiment, but a resource at the service of students, teachers and administrative staff," says Nunzio Fiore, CEO and Founder of Memori. "Our goal is to support universities on a path of digital transformation that improves the educational experience, facilitates teaching and research, and makes the daily management of activities more efficient. We are delighted to partner with Ex Machina, whose industry expertise has developed AIsuru-based solutions for the world of education. Their ability to translate our technology into concrete projects for universities represents a fundamental added value in bringing artificial intelligence to the service of the academic community".
"That's right" - confirms Sandro Cacciamani, CEO of Ex Machina Italia - "being a team formed by IT experts from the world of technology applied to university processes, we are therefore fortunate to know well in which processes AI can add value. And we immediately realised that AIsuru was the most suitable platform to bring to universities. In particular because the university by its very nature should not be tied to the use of one provider only, and even more importantly it should have the ability to control and act on the data that AI uses to produce its intended results.

Thanks to the collaboration with Ex Machina Italia, AIsuru is establishing itself as a reference point for Italian universities wishing to experiment with a conscious use of artificial intelligence in their processes. Each university involved is testing different agents according to its own priorities. The Catholic University of the Sacred Heart is adopting solutions to support the management of some administrative processes, and monitor in real time laws and regulations relevant to the university, optimising the regulatory update, as well as deploying bots to support Service Desk users, offering personalised, interactive and integrated assistance with human operators.The Alma Mater Studiorum - University of Bologna is expanding the use of the platform with agents dedicated to research and third mission, to enhance the skills of researchers and facilitate participation in calls for tenders and collaborations with companies.
Other universities, such as the University of Milan-Bicocca, the Polytechnic University of Turin, and the Polytechnic University of the Marches are instead working on agents for student orientation and navigation of the educational offer, with multilingual virtual assistants supporting the integration of international students and improving access to academic information.
The SPUIA Project - Smart Placement Unimore IA, developed with the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia and Almalaurea, financed by the Emilia-Romagna Region, and aimed at improving the matching between graduates' skills and companies' demands, and the Collaboration with LineAtenei, the community of university administrative operators, aimed at developing AI agents dedicated to shared internal processes, such as the management of resolutions and the annual single course sheets (the documents that are analysed to assess the quality of degree courses).

AIsuru is the platform developed by Memori to make generative artificial intelligence accessible, secure and truly useful in organisational processes. Designed for public bodies, businesses and professionals, it allows the creation of customised conversational agents without the need for programming, capable of managing activities such as customer service, administrative support, document management and internal training. Each agent can interact with documents, databases and company systems, providing up-to-date and contextual answers. The technological heart of the platform is 'Deep Thinking', a short and long term memory system that allows agents to remember conversations, adapt progressively to user needs and improve the quality of responses over time. AIsuru is GDPR and AI Act compliant, offers on-premise solutions for the protection of sensitive data and the possibility to choose between different language models (LLM), including local ones, thus guaranteeing maximum security, autonomy and flexibility of use.