Student retention

Purplebricks, the United Kingdom's leading online estate agent, transformed the real estate sector by eliminating traditional high street branches and introducing a digitally-driven process for both buyers and sellers. Leveraging both their on-the-ground local property experts and innovative digital solutions, they created a frictionless, hybrid customer journey characterized by ease, transparency, and personalized service. Central to their success was the adoption of Microsoft Advertising's AI-powered ad suite, including features such as Multimedia Ads, Video Ads, Image Extensions, and the Microsoft Audience Network for retargeting. By bringing campaign management in-house, Purplebricks gained deeper insights into performance, significantly improving conversion rates and return on advertising spend. The collaboration enabled consistent, engaging brand experiences across digital touchpoints, making search a top-performing sales and branding channel. Purplebricks achieved a 500% return on advertising spend and an 18% uplift in conversion rates, decisively enhancing their market leadership and setting a benchmark for digital real estate innovation.

PurplebricksReal Estate

Laureate Education, operating key universities in Mexico including Universidad del Valle de México and Unitec, sought to improve competitiveness and enrollment through more effective online student recruitment.They implemented a lower-funnel digital advertising strategy utilizing Microsoft Advertising capabilities, focusing on highly qualified leads closer to enrollment intent.By leveraging Microsoft's advanced targeting and AI campaign optimization, the universities significantly increased the quality and volume of student leads.The initiative led to the generation of over 15,000 additional leads at a lower-than-market-average cost per acquisition.Higher conversion rates enabled the universities to further increase their digital ad investments and overall enrollment success.This use case demonstrates the potential for targeted AI solutions to increase efficiency and effectiveness of educational marketing activities.

Laureate EducationEducation

Ellucian upgrades its CRM solutions for higher education by integrating Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Customer Service, and Power Platform, enhancing engagement and operational efficiency for institutions. This technological transition enables deeper insights into student retention and automates outreach processes, resulting in higher productivity and scalability.

Government of Andhra Pradesh partnered with Microsoft to address student dropouts in the region's schools. Using Azure Machine Learning and AI, a prediction app was developed to analyze data such as enrollments, student performance, demographics, school infrastructure, and teacher qualifications. This allowed administrators to proactively identify at-risk students. The solution was deployed across more than 10,000 schools, covering over 5 million students in 2017. The app enabled targeted counseling and intervention for students likely to leave school, directly contributing to improved retention rates. Early detection empowered educators to align resources and support where most needed. The article also highlights several other AI use cases, but the Andhra Pradesh implementation provides concrete data and outcomes.The solution demonstrates measurable education impact, supports government decision-making, and leverages trusted Microsoft cloud infrastructure for scale and security.

Government of Andhra PradeshEducation