Azure OpenAI tutor bot grounded in faculty courseware for blended-learning cohorts

The Challenge

Where the customer was when they called us

The institution ran a hybrid programme — 60% on-campus, 40% online — for 8,000 undergraduates across business and computer-science streams. Students bombarded faculty with the same questions every term, especially in the first 4 weeks. Faculty office hours were maxed out; teaching assistants were spending 60% of their time on FAQs that the syllabus answered.

The Dean wanted a tutor bot that only answered from faculty-approved courseware (no internet trawl, no hallucination), respected per-cohort access (a 2nd-year student should not see 4th-year content) and could cite the page it pulled the answer from.

What we built

The solution architecture

Azure OpenAI (gpt-4o + text-embedding-3-large) deployed in the customer’s Azure tenant.
Azure AI Search with hybrid (vector + BM25) retrieval over 1,200 faculty-approved PDFs.
Per-cohort security trimming: every chunk is tagged with cohort + course, enforced at retrieval.
Microsoft Entra ID SSO; bot inherits the student’s programme + cohort claims from the token.
Citations rendered inline (page + section) so students can click through to the source PDF.
Faculty “publish flow” built in Power Automate: drop a PDF in a SharePoint library, embeddings refresh nightly.
Application Insights + a custom feedback log capture confidence and student thumbs-up/down for continuous improvement.

Outcomes

What changed for the business

All numbers anonymized and rounded. Detailed reference call available under NDA.

4× Student engagement questions per active week

+19% Pass rate (gateway courses) cohort-vs-cohort comparison

8K Active students across 14 programmes

< 1.8s Median answer latency 90th percentile under 3.5s

Tech stack

Built on Microsoft Cloud

The full Microsoft estate — no proprietary lock-in beyond what the customer already runs.

Azure OpenAI Azure AI Search Microsoft Entra ID SharePoint Online Power Automate Application Insights Azure Key Vault Azure Front Door

Why KIT

What made the engagement work

Strict grounding architecture — no answer is generated without a retrieved source chunk.
Faculty publish flow keeps the human in the loop — teachers own what the bot can say.
Cohort security trimming pattern is reusable across other regulated education scenarios.