UniGuide: AI-Powered University Administrative Process Automation Assistant

UniGuide is an award-winning project of UMHackathon2026, an intelligent workflow assistant built on Z.AI GLM, designed specifically for university administrative scenarios. It addresses the pain points of fragmented and low-efficiency administrative processes in universities, enabling an end-to-end closed loop from natural language instructions to automated execution, and deeply integrating the comprehension capabilities of large language models with structured data from university administrative systems.

University administrative processes involve multiple departments, complex approval chains, and tedious form filling. When handling affairs, students need to repeatedly switch between different systems, which is time-consuming and error-prone. As an award-winning work, UniGuide targets this pain point, exploring the implementation of AI in vertical scenarios by combining large language models with university administrative system data.

Based on the Z.AI GLM large model and adopting the Agentic Workflow concept, the core three-layer architecture is as follows:

Natural Language Understanding Layer: GLM parses natural language instructions, identifies intents and extracts parameters, and maps to business processes; Workflow Orchestration Layer: Built-in predefined workflow templates covering common administrative scenarios at UM, including atomic operations like form filling and file upload; System Integration Layer: Integrates academic affairs, financial systems, and email services via APIs to achieve true end-to-end automation.

UniGuide covers multiple university administrative scenarios:

Transcript Application: When a student states their needs, the system automatically completes form filling, address selection, payment, and progress tracking, reducing the time from 30 minutes to 3 minutes; Scholarship Management: Integrates project information, intelligently reminds users to prepare materials and assists in submission; Student Status Affairs: Handles leave of absence, resumption of studies, major transfer, etc., generates a document list to guide steps and avoid omissions.

The core competitiveness lies in realizing a closed loop from understanding to execution:

Context Memory: Maintains long-term conversation context to handle complex cross-step queries; Exception Handling: Proactively notifies users and provides alternative solutions when encountering system failures, missing materials, etc.; Security and Privacy: Fine-grained permission control and audit logs ensure traceable operations.

UniGuide verifies the potential of vertical domain agents:

• More accurately understands domain terminology and business logic;
• Deeply integrates with existing IT infrastructure;
• Provides measurable and traceable business value.

This model serves as a new paradigm for AI implementation: large models act as an intelligent orchestration layer to connect scattered processes, providing architectural references for other universities and organizations.

In the future, the administrative assistant will enhance multimodal capabilities to handle inputs such as forms, ID photos, and handwritten signatures; the architecture reserves expansion points to support continuous evolution.

University administrative automation is just the starting point; the Agentic Workflow model can be extended to enterprise HR, finance, IT operation and maintenance, and other scenarios, becoming a core driver of digital transformation.