Not Just a Chatbot: Rethinking Intelligent Agents for Academic Support

The introduction of generative artificial intelligence (genAI) has created a significant disruption in higher education - it generated debates, concerns, fear, as well as change, optimism and opportunities (Abbas et al., 2024; Sucena et al., 2024). While genAI such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Copilot are used by students and staff alike for various reasons, another promising opportunity is the potential to create intelligent agents for specific use cases. Although some autonomous intelligent agents have been developed to support students in the study of specific academic disciplines (Caccavale, 2025; Wang et al., 2025) or general student enquiries (Ndunagu et al., 2025), few, if any, have been developed for personalised academic tutoring. This presentation discusses the development of an intelligent agent for academic and learning support, which can complement existing services in learning support centres, especially during out-of-work hours when contact with in-person services are unavailable. Our custom-created intelligent agent supports students in academic literacy and study skills, which is especially useful as we can manage the knowledge and advice that it disseminates. This means that we can constrain the intelligent agent’s responses to prioritise university-approved information and guidance. This also allows any other priorities, such as relevant events or institution-specific policies, to be disseminated by the agent. Our presentation will detail the development of 'Study Buddy’ to support student academic literacy and study skills. It will also explore factors to consider such as technology, user requirements, agent behaviour and knowledge, institutional support, and development and testing strategies.