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Every year, many new student candidates begin their journey toward joining BINUS University. Coming from different regions with diverse backgrounds and aspirations, they share the same hope: to receive a quality education that will help them to build a better future.
Amidst strong enthusiasm for student enrollment, long admission waitlists in applications remain a recurring challenge. As one of Indonesia’s largest universities, with a network of campuses across Jakarta, Tangerang, Bekasi, Bandung, Semarang, Malang, and Medan, this complexity creates an opportunity to provide better services with innovation. The challenge is not simply to accelerate processes, but to create an integrated, consistent, secure, and personalized experience throughout the student journey, from admission stage to their entire academic experience.
BINUS come up with “Student Journey AI”: a suiteof AI-powered solutions built on Microsoft Azure, designed to support four key moments in a student’s educational journey: applying, learning, accessing literacy support, and preparing for a career. At its core is a simple principle: technology helps accelerate the process, while people remain in control.
“We do not intend to introduce AI merely as a feature of technology, but an integral part of the learning ecosystem that supports students from the very beginning of the admission process, through their studies, access to knowledge, and preparing for their careers. Through collaboration with Microsoft, BINUS is providing a faster, more relevant, and more personalized experience, while continuing to ensure that important decisions remain in the hands of students, lecturers, and faculty staff,” said Stephen Wahyudi Santoso, President of BINUS Higher Education.
Fast and Reliable Admissions for Prospective Students
The journey begins at the registration stage. Each prospective student uploads their photo for identification, then takes the admission test or Tes Potensi Keberhasilan Studi (TPKS). Previously, each identity entry was verified manually, taking 8–10 minutes. To verify 30–40 people only, staff could spend almost an entire working day, and this manual process also created opportunities for someone else to take the test on a student’s behalf (impersonation).
BINUS now uses AI Face Recognition with ‘liveness detection’ and ‘face comparison’. A photo taken directly from the participant’s device is compared in real-time with reference data, ensuring that the person present is truly the registered student. The system runs on Azure services, capable of handling up to 750 transactions per second. This implementation now supports the identity verification process for more than 7,500 prospective students across BINUS campuses, including Jakarta, Tangerang, Bekasi, Bandung, Semarang, Malang, and Medan, providing a standardized, fast, and reliable verification process at scale. The solution is also designed to integrate easily with existing systems and is equipped with fallback mechanisms, manual override, and real-time monitoring to maintain operational reliability and responsible AI implementation.
The impact is tangible. Identity verification, which previously took around 10 minutes, can now be completed in less than 3 seconds; an improvement in process efficiency of up to 95% compared with the manual method. The need for manual intervention has also been reduced by more than 90%, while the verification success rate has reached more than 90% on the first attempt. Overall, this automation results in an estimated operational cost efficiency of around Rp195 million (± USD 12,000) per annum.
For students, it provides a first impression of the acceleration and sense of security ensured by the university. And for staff, hundreds of working hours that were previously taken up can now be redirected to other, higher-value work.
Giving Lecturers More Time to Focus on Teaching
Once officially enrolled, students continue their journey into the classroom, much of which now takes place digitally. Online discussion forums have become the heart of interaction between lecturers and students. However, in classes with hundreds of participants, lecturers need to navigate numerous threads: identifying unanswered questions, filtering repetitive responses, and ensuring that important contributions are not overlooked. This process can be time-consuming and may delay academic feedback.
AI Forum Summary helps lecturers reclaim that valuable time. Powered by Azure OpenAI, the system summarizes lengthy discussions into key points based to the criteria set by the lecturer. Most importantly, lecturers still have control to edit and verify every summary before it is shared with students. This human-in-the-loop approach allows AI to accelerate the process, while ensuring that final decisions remain in the hands of educators.
The pilot delivered clear, measurable results. The time required to summarize a single discussion forum dropped dramatically from 60–120 minutes to approximately 1 minute, or 95% reduction, saving more than 30 hours per class in each semester. During the pilot, the system generated 652 summaries, 615 of which were published, with lecturer acceptance reaching 94.33%. In terms of cost, each process costs only USD 0.0108, with a total pilot cost of USD 7.04, or around 50% below the initial estimate. Adoption among lecturers also continued to grow consistently: from 7 lecturers using it in the first week of the pilot, average weekly usage increased to around 23 active lecturers per week, more than tripling (235%), and even reached a peak of 50 lecturers in a single week, with a total of 101 different lecturers having used AI Forum Summary to date.
“To me personally, AI is not a replacement for lecturers, but a tool that helps reduce the burden of routine work. This way, we can focus more on supporting students, having discussions, and creating a more meaningful learning experience,” said Pandu Dwi Luhur Pambudi, Faculty Member BINUS University.
Making It Easier for Students to Find Literacy Support
Throughout their studies, every student rely on references such as books, journals, theses, or articles to work on their coursework and research. Previously, they had to type keywords into the digital library, then sift through the search results one by one to find relevant materials. It was time consuming process, particularly for students exploring a new field of study.
Today, BINUS’ digital library service (LKC) is evolving from a simple search tool into a personalized recommendation provider. Built with Azure AI, Azure Machine Learning, and a vector database, the system understands each student’s academic context (major, courses, and even reading history) and recommends the most relevant collections as soon they open the app. The system is designed to serve more than 2,000 users simultaneously.
Through this implementation, BINUS aims to increase LKC traffic by 8–12%, while access to digital collections is expected to increase by 12–18%. The Click-Through Rate recommendation is expected to achieve 8–12%, and a user satisfaction rate expected to exceed 70%.
This demonstrates how advances in technology can make knowledge more accessible and relevant to students, allowing them to maximize the possible positive impact.
Preparing Students for Their Future Careers
As students approach the final stage of their academic journey, many students face the same question: how can they leverage their academic achievements into career readiness? In the past, the answer relied heavily on manual career counseling, which took 45–60 minutes per student and serving only around 8-14 students per day.
The AI-Driven Career Growth Recommendations, powered by Azure OpenAI (GPT-4o-mini) and integrated directly in the BINUSMAYA platform, is designed to overcome those limitations. Based on the student’s profile, competencies, and career aspirations, the system generates profile summaries, competency or career gap analysis, certification recommendations, and even a self-development plan that students can follow step by step, with insights delivered in near real time.
The expected outcomes is also significant. Career counseling services that were previously limited are now expected to scale across the institution, with an estimated workforce capacity value equivalent to around Rp144 million per year as a cost avoidance target. More importantly, the role of career coaches can shift from administrative to becoming a strategic career mentors, enabling students to complete their BINUS journey better prepared to enter the workforce.
One Journey, One Partnership
From the very first moment students take their steps toward a career, BINUS is delivering a faster, more consistent, secure, and personalized experience for thousands of students, powered by Microsoft Azure and guided by a clear principle: people remain in control of important decisions that matter.
This goes beyond technology adoption. It provides a blueprint for how higher education in Indonesia can transform in the AI era by placing students at the heart of every innovation.
“Our collaboration with BINUS demonstrates how responsible AI can create real impact for education in Indonesia. When technology is designed around human needs, the result can deliver a better experience for students, lecturers, and the entire campus community,” said Gunawan Susanto, Country General Manager, Microsoft Indonesia.
The collaboration between BINUS and Microsoft can be perceived as a reminder that in the digital era, the best technology is the one built for one simple but meaningful purpose: to provide the best experience for students from enrollment to graduation, also as they start their professional journey.
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