How RMIT University Uses AI Automation to Return 60,000 Staff Hours
RMIT University is one of Australia’s largest and most globally connected universities, serving hundreds of thousands of students across campuses in Melbourne, Vietnam, Spain, and partner institutions worldwide. Facing high volumes of international student applications and administrative workflows spread across multiple disconnected systems, RMIT’s automation team deployed 27 automation solutions using Automation Anywhere’s platform, including five AI-powered automations. Over three years, RMIT returned more than 60,000 staff hours to the institution—equivalent to 24 years of capacity—while processing more than 20,000 student requests with greater speed and accuracy.
Impact
60,000+
Total staff hours returned (3 years)
20,000+
Student requests processed via automation
27
Automation solutions deployed
5
AI-powered automations live
7,000
International applications pre-screened
3,000
Assessor hours returned in admissions
80%
Reduction in student follow-up emails
Challenge
RMIT’s international admissions team spent excessive time on manual document review, data transfers across multiple systems, and student follow-ups for missing materials—a high-resource process that scaled poorly with growing international enrollment volumes.
Solution
RMIT deployed 27 automation solutions on Automation Anywhere’s Automation 360 platform, including AI-powered document classification for admissions that auto-classifies documents, validates data, generates follow-up messages, and surfaces AI summaries for assessors—eliminating the most time-intensive manual steps.
Tools & Technologies
What Leaders Say
“We have delivered automation solutions to all areas of the university, and over the past three years, our real-time dashboard shows that we have returned more than 60,000 hours, or 24 years, of staff capacity to the university.”
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Full Story
RMIT University operates at scale—hundreds of thousands of students, thousands of administrative staff, and complex international admissions processes that span documents, compliance requirements, and multiple enterprise systems. For years, the university processed international applications largely by hand: staff manually classified documents, chased missing information from applicants, and transferred data across disconnected platforms. Each review cycle consumed hours of assessor time, and error rates and follow-up volumes reflected the strain of purely manual workflows.
The RMIT Automation team was built around a co-ownership model—working directly with business units to identify friction, co-design solutions, and build institutional confidence in automation. Rather than centralizing automation in IT, the team embedded itself in admissions, student services, HR, and finance, treating process owners as partners rather than recipients of change.
For international admissions—the most complex and highest-volume use case—the team deployed a generative AI-powered document classification system. The AI reads and categorizes application documents, validates data against external sources, auto-generates follow-up messages to applicants with missing materials, and produces AI-generated summaries to help assessors review applications faster. Across all use cases, RMIT now runs 27 automation solutions on Automation Anywhere’s Automation 360, Control Room, Automation Workspace, and Co-Pilot for Business.
The admissions automation pre-screens 7,000 applications, returns 3,000 assessor hours, and reduces student follow-up emails by 80%—a meaningful improvement in applicant experience alongside efficiency gains. Across the university, 60,000+ staff hours have been returned over three years, and 20,000+ student requests are processed through automation annually.
RMIT is now evolving toward Agentic Process Automation—a model in which adaptive, multi-step AI agents handle complex administrative workflows end-to-end. The university presented this work at the 2025 Imagine Australia conference, signaling its position as a benchmark for AI-driven transformation in higher education.
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