AI-powered messaging and super-powered student engagement with StudentIgnite

The people behind StudentIgnite were already in the business of connecting to some of Australia’s best education providers. But they had spotted a gap: those providers needed more support to turn warm leads into students. StudentIgnite was the answer. Using AI-powered conversations and Sinch’s robust communications infrastructure, the platform stays in contact with potential students, sparking conversations and answering questions.

“We realised we needed a platform that would meet the biggest disconnect in the enrolment pathway – how quickly providers could get back to leads,” says Will Santow, Founder and CEO of Course Finder Group, the creators of StudentIgnite.

For education providers in Australia, getting enrolments takes time – something they don’t have enough of. Overloaded teams working with manual CRMs and communication systems struggled to get back to leads quickly. In the delay, potential students were finding places with other education providers.

“75% of leads come in after hours, so if your admissions centre is nine-to-five, there’s a huge lag. That means lost opportunities, lost enrolments and wasted marketing spend,” explains Will.

StudentIgnite went live early in 2026. Plugged into Sinch, the platform’s AI agent gets in touch with leads via text message, using natural language processing to engage potential students in conversations. Via SMS, the bot will learn about the student’s goals and requirements, confirm key details, and even book appointments with advisors. StudentIgnite call the AI agent Herbot, but education providers can give it a new name and tone of voice to fit their brand.

“If the lead comes in at 11pm on Saturday night, Herbot responds by 11.01pm. The lead won’t go cold over the weekend, and the student is twice or three times as likely to engage.

“Then on Monday the student admissions team wakes up with lots of pre-booked meetings in their calendar.”

It’s already making a difference, with improved lead engagement, increased conversions and lower acquisition costs.

• Skyrocketing engagement
  Under the old system, just 17-35% of leads ever connected with an RTO. Now, a huge 60-80% engage.

• Fast-growing conversions
  Clients using StudentIgnite have an average seen a 50% average increase in lead-to-enrolment rates.

• Lower conversion costs
  Because providers are converting more students from the same pool of leads, overall acquisition costs are down.

The system is also helping providers reactivate old leads. StudentIgnite automatically trawls through cold leads, then uses Herbot to reach out via SMS – potentially capturing lost enrolments from months earlier.

“You quite often find that with those leads you can pick up more enrolments.”

More benefits for providers: regulatory compliance is built into Sinch’s infrastructure, along with rich information about incoming leads. After the two-way conversation with a lead, Herbot can share or pass on career goals and preferences to the advisor.

Of course, the best AI Agents only work when messages can get through. It’s why Sinch’s enterprise-grade infrastructure was a must-have for Will, proven across 700 billion messages with 99.999% uptime.

The set-and-forget infrastructure requires very little management or troubleshooting for busy education providers. It’s also built to scale, easily handling explosive growth in volume, like during peak enrolment periods.

“I have high levels of confidence that Sinch can handle 10,000 or 15,000 leads a month – and hopefully many multiples of that, as we scale,” says Will.

Even better, many of the course providers were already using Sinch, making it easy to integrate the new platform with existing systems. That ease of use was a key factor for Will and his team.

“We wanted to make sure that a non-tech without a tech team can literally self-onboard, all in a very logical sort of non-tech workflow. They can be live on the platform and working within 20 minutes.”

That simplicity also means providers are spending almost nothing to get up and running.

For Will’s development team, the API integration was incredibly straightforward. Instead of building and managing messaging infrastructure, they could plug in the SMS layer and focus on developing StudentIgnite’s complex AI logic and CRM mapping.

StudentIgnite launched six months ago, enrolling more students without increasing their acquisition costs.

Because it’s built on Sinch’s communication infrastructure, StudentIgnite is also set up for future growth and will be able to expand outreach using tools like WhatsApp, without investing in new technology.

“I’m super excited that through leaning into this platform, with the right partners like Sinch on the messaging side of things, we can plug that leaky bucket for the training providers and massively improve their unit economics for enrolling new students.” – Will Santow, Founder and CEO, Course Finder Group.