Reducing Student Loans with Bot-Powered Humans

Learn how NextGenVest is using deep learning to scale human advice over SMS to help Gen Z reduce student loan burdens. Despite the average college graduate owing $37,000 in student loans, they leave $2.7 billion in free money unclaimed because they do not have access to guidance.  In this talk we’ll start with an overview of state-of-the-art chatbot models and explore their benefits and limitations. This first part will aim to bridge the gap between research state-of-the-art and business practicality. We’ll proceed with a technical overview of our neural-network based model, reward function and design choices from both a technical and business perspective. We’ll end by showing performance in the wild through our real-time SMS chats and our impact on the broader education system compared to ongoing DOE efforts. We’ll end with a brief discussion about using human-first bots and why AI-assisted human interactions should be human-first.