ABOUT
Global University Systems (GUS) owns and operates 30+ higher education institutions serving over 100,000 on-campus students and 20 million online learners worldwide. Following a successful pilot at University of Europe for Applied Sciences, GUS rapidly scaled Havana’s AI Agent across 13 brands and counting.
INDUSTRY
Higher Education Management
CRM
Salesforce
Challenge
GUS needed a way to scale enrollment without scaling headcount.
With over 30 institutions under its umbrella, GUS faced a massive operational bottleneck: growth was tied to headcount.
Reliance on Headcount Growth. To grow the business, GUS historically had to hire more advisors. This created a cycle of increasing costs, management overhead, and training demands just to handle more leads.
Inconsistent Quality. With hundreds of advisors sending manual emails, ensuring a professional, accurate, and consistent tone across every interaction was impossible.
Menial Administrative Tasks. Highly skilled advisors were wasting hours on low-value tasks—manually clicking through CRM records and emailing unresponsive leads instead of focusing on high-value conversations.
“You’re effectively caught in this loop of driving growth through increasing headcount and driving your team to be more productive. But there's only so many hours in a day. The quality of the work people are doing could potentially drop off if they're overworked or if they’re expected to do too much.”
Bryan Palmer
Chief Commercial Officer EMENA, Global University Systems
Solution
GUS ran a pilot program at the University of Europe to test whether Havana could automate outreach and follow-up at scale.
During the pilot, Havana:
Revived Lost Opportunities. Havana targeted leads that had gone cold or were unresponsive, persistently re-engaging them.
Maintained Consistent Quality at Scale. Havana replaced template emails with personalized messaging and a consistent, professional tone across thousands of conversations.
Enabled Data-Driven Optimization. Unlike manual outreach, Havana allowed the team to rigorously track which messages resonated best, allowing the team to test and refine their strategy.
“The ability to track if a particular message resonates better with students has certainly helped us in terms of making changes to our campaigns and messaging. That’s something that isn’t necessarily clear to do when you leave it to the (individual) advisors.”
Heeral Shah
Director of Sales Excellence and Operations, Global University Systems
Results & Impact
The pilot generated immediate revenue and sparked a network-wide demand for AI adoption.
The success at the University of Europe proved the business case for Havana’s AI, leading to tangible revenue and a rapid expansion to other institutions:
Automated Outreach at Scale. Havana initiated 125,000+ conversations and qualified 6,000+ leads without any headcount growth.
Immediate Revenue Impact. Within just the pilot phase for a single school within the group (University of Europe) pilot, Havana generated more than 30 applications. After scaling up, Havana has helped to drive more than 500 enrollments across the group.
Culture Shift. Instead of viewing AI as another tool to be learnt, recruitment teams began competing for access to the tool.
Network-Wide Rollout. The success at University of Europe created internal demand, with Havana being deployed in 13 brands, including The University of Law, University Canada West and University of Niagara Falls, and more in line.
“A lot of Havana’s outreach has been to lost opportunities—students who had gotten out of touch or who had gone a bit cold. Reengaging them would have been virtually impossible without adding headcount.”
Chief Commercial Officer EMENA
Conclusion
For Global University Systems, Havana transformed growth from a headcount problem into a technology advantage. With 13 brands deployed and counting, GUS is proving that intelligent automation, not more headcount, is the future of enrollment at scale.
“There's a little bit of jealousy going on amongst the teams. They’re looking at the University of Europe who've had the tool for four months now, and they’re all starting to say, 'What about us? When can we get it?'”
Bryan Palmer
Chief Commercial Officer EMENA
