Polly: AI Admissions Agent Chatbot
Your school’s 24/7 AI-powered admissions rep — fully integrated into poliSCHOOL’s school enrollment software. No coffee breaks. No sick days. No missed leads.
What Is an AI Admissions Agent?
Most schools are still relying on a chatbot that collects a name and email address, sends a generic reply, and calls it a day. That’s not an admissions agent — that’s a contact form with a little personality.
Polly Admissions Agent is something fundamentally different. It’s a true AI admissions agent embedded as a live chat widget directly on your school’s website. Powered by agentic AI and trained with thousands of lines of instructions specific to trade schools, Polly doesn’t just answer questions — it actively guides prospective students through your enrollment process, around the clock, using real data from your school.
The difference between a chatbot and an AI admissions agent comes down to one word: integration. Generic chatbots live outside your systems. Polly lives inside poliSCHOOL. That means it has real-time access to your course catalog, start dates, program schedules, enrollment requirements, application status, payment records, and more — and it uses all of it to have genuinely helpful, personalized conversations with every single person who visits your website.
Why Trade Schools Need AI Admissions Software
Trade schools operate in a uniquely competitive and time-sensitive environment. Prospective students are often working adults making major career decisions. They research at odd hours, they want fast answers, and if your school doesn’t respond quickly — they move on to the next one.
Generic AI admissions software wasn’t built for this. It doesn’t know the difference between a welding program and an HVAC certification. It doesn’t understand clock-hour programs, accreditation-specific enrollment requirements, or the nuances of funding sources like WIOA or state grants. It certainly doesn’t know your school’s specific programs, start dates, or which documents a student still needs to submit.
Polly does.
poliSCHOOL’s Admissions Agent was built from the ground up for trade schools — with training and guardrails specific to vocational and career education. It knows your programs because it reads your course catalog. It knows your students because it’s connected to your poliSCHOOL database. And it knows what to say — and what not to say — because it’s been trained with compliance guardrails that keep it on-message and professional at all times.
Here’s what sets Polly apart from every other AI admissions software on the market:
Trained specifically for trade school admissions workflows Fully integrated into poliSCHOOL — not a third-party bolt-on Real-time access to your course catalog, start dates, and policies Reads and updates individual lead and applicant records as conversations happen Creates follow-up tasks (phone calls, campus tours) automatically Inserts notes and stores every conversation in the student’s contact history Categorizes conversations so you can track topic trends in your Metrics dashboard Crawls your school’s website to pull the most current information Operates 24/7 — including nights, weekends, and holidays
TESTIMONIALS
"I love poliSCHOOL, I have been doing this type of work since 2002 and this is absolutely the best CRM that I have ever used!"
"poliSCHOOL has been easy to learn and to train others on. My admissions team says it has changed their lives. We are very pleased!"
"I cannot recommend this company enough! The portal is very user friendly for the students, administrators and instructors. I especially love the fact that when you are in need of customer service the wait time is very little and you are dealing with a live person! I give poliSCHOOL a 10++"
"Your team should be awarded the Fastest Response Award!!! You guys are awesome!!!"
"When I was first introduced to poliSCHOOL I was both intrigued and a bit apprehensive about what kinds of changes I'd be facing with our schools current process of enrolling students as well as communicating with them. Needless to say I was a bit overwhelmed. But after some time and a few training sessions I became more and more familiar and grew to really like the changes. It has eliminated a lot of manual record keeping and it is always easy to find a students current or past records. Bookkeeping or payment tracking has been wonderful . Finally the support of the staff that is at our beckon call when needed is unmatched. I can say I am extremely happy for the change we made to this online portal."
"The poliSCHOOL team is extremely helpful in navigating software with personal trainings and videos!! I also use them as webmaster and my inquires/traffic increased 100 fold to my institution. I am very satisfied with using poliSCHOOL and their team."
"Every time we have a new idea we'd like to see added to poliSCHOOL Paul has done it for me! He always makes me feel like my issues are his #1 priority and he does it with a smile!! Even when I mess something up he fixes the error and makes my day."
"What is not to love about poliSCHOOL. All in one CRM, Students Record Keeping, Scheduler, Paperless Filing, Receive payments, it allows us to stay in contact with our students via e-mail and text and so much more. But most importantly is the Fantastic customer service, Paul really goes out of his way to help in any way he can. If you need something specific just voice your idea and he will try his best to assist you and make it happened. But most importantly it's affordable especially if you're a small school with a strict budget like us. I'm so glad I was referred to poliSCHOOL it has changed the way we do things in our school."
"I would highly recommend Paul and poliSCHOOL to any small to medium size trade school. Paul has taken us under his wing and helped us grow our single location by over 400% in the first year using the poliSCHOOL program. We are now in the process of opening up multiple locations in multiple states; thanks partly to poliSCHOOL and how good of a program it is. Stop thinking about it and sign up!"
"I appreciate how responsive the poliSCHOOL staff is! When help is needed they are always there to help navigate through the problem quickly and efficiently!"
AI Built for Trade Schools.
AI Trained for Compliance.
Frequently Asked Questions:
Is Polly a chatbot or something more?
Polly is a true agentic AI — not a scripted chatbot. Unlike basic chatbots that respond to preset questions, Polly analyzes context, accesses live data from your poliSCHOOL account, and takes meaningful actions like updating records, creating tasks, adding notes to assist admissions staff, and guiding students through multi-step processes.
Does Polly replace my admissions staff?
No — and that’s by design. Polly handles the high-volume, repetitive inquiries that eat up your team’s time: program questions, application status, document checklists, start dates, funding options. Your staff stays focused on the conversations that actually require a human — relationship-building, complex situations, and closing enrollments.
What happens if Polly doesn’t know the answer?
Polly uses a combination of your poliSCHOOL data, system settings, catalog, and a web crawler trained on your school’s website. If a question falls outside its knowledge base or involves a sensitive topic, it’s designed to gracefully redirect the conversation and flag it for follow-up by your team.
Is my student data secure?
Yes. Polly operates entirely within poliSCHOOL’s existing security infrastructure. No student data is shared with r sold to with third-party providers. What gets sent to an LLM is truncated, masked, or anonymized to protect PII before it gets sent to the AI Agent. All changes to a lead or applicant record are stored in update history, and all conversations are stored securely within the student’s contact record in poliSCHOOL for review. There are thousands of additional lines of code before and after the AI agent to verify input and output and ensure that nothing changes unless it passes all the hard-coded poliSCHOOL gates first – gates that sit between the LLM and the data (i.e. AI has no direct access to your files or database).
Can I customize what Polly says about my school?
Yes — within the guardrails. You can configure your course catalog, program details, funding sources, enrollment requirements, and system settings to shape how Polly represents your school. The compliance guardrails are fixed for everyone’s protection.
What if I already have the Webmaster add-on?
Great news — Polly is included in the Webmaster add-on at no additional charge. You’re already covered.
Can I get the AI Admissions Agent without poliSCHOOL?
No: what makes our AI Agent so unique is that it is integrated into software that is already laser targeted for use by vocational and trade schools – it requires that integration to be as effective as it is.