Embracing AI Empowers Campus Store Leaders

by Dan Angelo

Artificial intelligence has become a much-talked-about topic, and much of that attention is focused on potential concerns. Some college store professionals are finding something much different.

For instance, campus stores are using AI to help students manage their course materials, opens up more time to deal with real issues, according to presenters at the “AI in Your Store: The Next Evolution of Campus Retail Work” education session at CAMEX26 in Phoenix, AZ.

“Set the bar high for yourselves; the technology is incredible, and we are moving out of that phase that it doesn’t work super well, but super interesting,” said session facilitator Jared Pearlman, chief strategy officer at VitalSource. “We’re in the phase where you can look at real step changes and step functions, that kind of change for your organization.”

The campus store presenters for the session were Loretto Evans, director of course materials, California Baptist University Campus Store, Riverside, and Clay Ludlow, director, retail services, Cedarville University Campus Store, Cedarville, OH. 

Evans explained how she uses AI in three specific ways in her store. The first is by creating videos for students to understand how to correctly access their course materials. The series of two-minute videos explains the process of finding course materials in the store and issues that may arise, which has led to a decrease in the number of emails asking for additional help from 150 to 20 at the beginning of the school term.

“Think about the time I got back to help someone who needed help in real time because I didn’t have to sift through 150 emails to get the 20 students who actually needed assistance,” she said. “It’s not replacing us. It’s allowing us to do a deeper connection with the students and do more in-depth training because they’ve already seen the rudimentary parts through a video.”

The videos were made through a platform called Vyond and employed a cartoon format. The Vyond platform offers this as a free subscription, which is tokenized so that it can begin charging once a certain level of use is reached.

The second way she is using AI is through analytical predictive modeling. By creating prompts when using AI software, such as Claude and ChatGPT, Evans can better understand the course materials that are required and in the classes that are most likely to sell through, whether that’s through sales or rentals.

The final way Evans uses AI is with chatbots, created in-house by a Cal Baptist student working on the institution’s internship graduation requirement.

“That chatbot picks up emails from our immediate access inbox and scans for very specific words,” Evans explained. “Once the chatbot identifies what the student can’t access, it sends the student a hyperlink on our server to instructions that we have prefabricated.”

Ludlow focuses more on how he makes AI work for him in his Cedarville store. He uses the RACE framework, an acronym for role, action, context, and execution, that is part of the services provided by Trust Insights, a firm that specializes in AI marketing.

“This is something you want to incorporate in any complex task you’re asking your AI platform to do,” he said. “If you’re trying to accomplish a big thing, you’re going to need a big prompt and we need to tell it its role, action, context, and then an execution command.”

By big prompts Ludlow means providing more than just rudimentary questions. If you do, you’ll simply get the same sort of information offered in a regular Google search. Prompts should address all the information needed, and it probably will require some instructions repeated often.

“You’re going to tell it its role in all of this,” Ludlow said. “You’re going to tell it exactly the big picture of what you’re trying to do. You’re going to give it tons of context, and I highly recommend repeating yourself if it’s important context. And finally, an execution command is usually only necessary on very large prompts.”

Sometimes complex prompts lead to more questions, which become sub-prompts in the process. The prompt and sub-prompt process does take time, but it’s all set up in a way that a user can return to the prompt hours or days after it is started.

“I think where AI is really, really helpful is you don’t just have to press enter and then take whatever it gets you,” Ludlow said. “You can work it out with it.”

Another way AI helps the Cedarville store is by analyzing costs and recommending the most profitable ways forward. It used to take three days to run analytics on buy-back, according to Ludlow, adding that it now takes 20 minutes using Python, a leading programming language for AI.

“It’s gives me the spreadsheet with the ISBNs and the price next to it,” he said. “I’ve never written a line of Python in my life, but now we’ve got a real working program and all that starts with the right prompt.

“This is your new superpower,” Ludlow continued. “It’s empowering you, not the opposite. You’re empowering AI to do your job. AI is empowering you to do more and accomplish more at your job.”