Sabih Bin Wasi, Founder & CEO
Every campus I've visited lately is having some version of the same conversation: what do we do about AI? Like most tech companies right now, it's something we've been sitting with too, and I wanted to share how we're thinking about it and where we're headed.
The vision that has driven Stellic from the beginning is a student who can see their full journey clearly, and a campus that can support it without the friction getting in the way. Our approach has always been to build that journey around progress: what a student is planning, what their advisor knows, what their degree requires, what they've tried and changed, and what they're moving toward. We see AI as a tool that lets us close the gap between those pieces more fully than we could before.
Whenever we approach anything new at Stellic, we start with principles, and as we talked with campus partners about where AI could matter most, one became clear: AI is an AND, not an OR. There are two key things we're thinking about underneath that. The first is capacity. We want to empower advisors, registrars, and student success professionals with more room to do what they do well. The advisor who sits with a first-generation student navigating a hard semester is doing something no model should replace. The registrar who understands why a policy exception matters for a specific student is exercising judgment that belongs with a person. Our job is to give those people better information so they can spend their time on the work that needs them.
The second is trust. AI is only as good as the data it works from, and Stellic was built around context from the start. When the system already understands how a student's decisions and progress move through their journey, AI has something real to work from. That is what will make these features worth trusting with decisions that affect students' lives, and it is why we're designing them to keep a person in the loop: a student confirms a pathway before it changes their plan, an advisor decides on outreach, a registrar validates audit rules before they go live.
Here is some of what we're building toward. In higher ed, getting answers out of institutional data has usually meant waiting on someone who knows how to build the report. Natural language reporting is meant to close that gap, so the people closest to students can just ask. A dean could see which programs have the most off-track students. An enrollment leader could ask where planning engagement is lowest. When those answers reach the right person sooner, students get support sooner.
Custom pathway generation changes where planning starts. Today a student often begins with a generic path. We want the one in front of them to reflect their actual situation from the first click: the credits they have, their constraints, their interests, their timeline. As things change, the plan changes with them, and the student and their advisor shape it together.
The piece on my mind most is the connection of degree progress and careers. A freshman is asked to choose a direction before they have any real sense of what it could become. What if instead, from their first semester, a student could see how today's choices connect to where they might be headed, and play out different futures before committing to one? We want to give a campus what it needs to carry a student from that first semester all the way to the life they're working toward.
We started Stellic because we believed every student deserved to be a success story. That's still the mission: 10 million of them by 2030. AI just changes how much progress we can make on it, and how quickly.
Sabih
