On October 7, Uprizon will speak at Éducation 2030 at Salesforce Paris, on the partner panel: “Turning ambition into reality: what works?”. Here is what we will argue.

Ralph Abou Selwan, President of Uprizon, will speak on behalf of Uprizon, bringing our perspective on how institutions attract and build relationships with future students.

A lost applicant costs more than it used to

Cohorts are shrinking. For years, attractiveness was measured in volume: fairs, campaigns, lists. That is no longer enough, because every lost applicant now costs more.

In the field, applicants are rarely lost for lack of interest. They are lost because an application is complex, a question goes unanswered, or an obstacle (funding, housing, career prospects) is never addressed.

That is why we argue for a change of perspective: from broadcasting to conversation, and from the “lead” to the person and their project.

What applicants expect, what institutions deliver

The gap shows up in four places.

  • Time and continuity. An applicant asks a question when it occurs to them, on the channel they use every day, and expects an answer within hours. The school answers in days, by email, with three teams that do not share the same view of the file.
  • Silence after admission. Between admission and the start of term, an admitted student can still hesitate. That is where enrolments are lost.
  • Events treated as broadcasting. Open days, immersion days and webinars should be a step in recruitment, with distinct follow-up for those who came and those who could not.
  • Parents. They weigh in on the decision while the applicant is busy with exams and then summer: they need their own journeys and channels, linked to the same record.

One last, quieter point: applicants increasingly turn to AI assistants before they even visit a school’s website. Being visible and accurate in those answers is becoming an attractiveness issue in its own right.

Three choices to move from ambition to action

When a school wants to convert interest into enrolments, we make three choices with it, in this order.

  1. Decide what you manage. Not a contact, but a person, their study project and their target intake. That means cleaning data at the point of entry rather than afterwards, naming a source of truth per domain and deciding who holds consent, applicant or parent. Our principle: standard before custom. The closer you stay to Education Cloud, the less technical debt you build up.
  2. Trigger on the real status of the application, not on the calendar. File started, documents missing, interview to book, offer received: each status triggers the right content, or the right conversation with an advisor. The human is built into the journey at the steps where they make the difference.
  3. Connect acquisition to enrolment. Link campaigns, sources, events and application statuses to know which euro invested produces an enrolment, and stop advertising to someone who has already enrolled.

AI fits this logic. It takes on a growing share of preparation, follow-up and answers to routine questions. The schools that get the most from it have clean data shared across marketing, admissions and advisors, and keep the human at key moments: the school sets the objective and the rules, the agent prepares and optimizes, the advisor decides and advises.

Uprizon’s perspective

Named Salesforce Rising Star Partner of the Year FY27 for France, Uprizon helps organizations unify their data, automate their processes and deploy agentic AI on the Salesforce platform. In higher education, these capabilities span the entire student lifecycle: attracting and recruiting new audiences, personalizing the journey from application to graduation, and keeping alumni engaged.

Our advice for getting started is simple: pick one moment in the journey where you lose applicants. The incomplete file, the summer between admission and start of term, or open days. Treat it end to end: clean data, a trigger based on the applicant’s real status, a human at the right time, a result metric. One quarter is enough to see the effects.

And build it as a brick. The journey, the data and the agent you put in place today can be reused for the next one, without starting from scratch. On one of our education projects, digitalizing marketing and admissions end to end delivered over 10,000 prospects acquired, 30% higher conversion and ten fewer days to process applications.

See you on October 7

Our experts will be on site all day to discuss how Education Cloud, Data 360, Agentforce and Tableau help institutions better understand their audiences, make data-driven decisions and build their growth models. One question runs through the day: where will growth come from in 2030, and how can institutions prepare now?

See you on October 7 at Salesforce Paris: let’s prepare the future of higher education together.