In education, nothing beats personalized assistance — a challenge in a field that’s all about teaching mass groups. While it might be impossible for a teacher to give every student one-on-one guidance with assignments, MindStudio AI applications have changed the equation in both lower level and higher education. By leveraging their expertise, the right custom data sources and AI workflows, the education sector is creating interactive assistants en masse to improve the work of both students and educators.

Case Study: Academic Insight Lab

Jessica Parker and her partner Kimberly Becker have collectively spent decades as lecturers, academic consultants, and coaches for PhD candidates. The duo were highly aware of the struggles within higher academia, primarily a lack of individual feedback for students, and an overwhelm of tedious review for time-crunched professors. 

Jessica was the first to discover MindStudio, and despite having no training as a coder, she was able to create her first simple AI application in 15 minutes. She quickly built an application for her students to help analyze their writing, as well as one to synthesize feedback on manuscripts. More followed, and soon Kim - who immediately saw the value of using AI to automate student and teacher workflows - joined in. As they spent more and more bandwidth creating and refining the AI's they had built, it dawned on them that generative AI and MindStudio could be the engine of an entirely new business.

Over a single weekend in September, the two of them created 50 different applications, folding their previous companies and launching Academic Insight Lab. Grouped into three subscription tiers, each app is focused on a narrow part of academic writing or analysis, with names such as "Literature Synthesis Mentor" and "Research Design Co-Pilot." 

The company went from a few dozen subscribers under their old model to 300 within two weeks. They're now at 1,300 and counting. AI Lab holds weekly sessions with customers, adjusting the tools based on feedback. Since launch, universities have reached out to the pair about using white-label versions of their tools, and they've also received interest from international schools.

There are nine million grad students in the U.S. alone. While the dream of giving them all one-on-one academic support is impossible, Academic Insight Lab is making the next best thing a reality: on demand coaching for academic work, powered by generative AI.