How RMIT University Uses AI Automation to Return 60,000 Staff Hours

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.