Webinar Alert: What Nobody Tells You About AI in Higher Education | Thursday | 8th Oct 26
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Webinar Alert: What Nobody Tells You About AI in Higher Education | Thursday | 8th Oct 26
Rahul Pandey
Estd. Reading Time : 4 Min.
30th Sep, 2026
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Kazakhstan’s higher-education sector is already operating at a significant digital scale. At the beginning of the 2025/26 academic year, 116 higher-education institutions served 678,100 students, while 208,900 students were newly admitted, a 13.7% increase in first-year intake compared with the previous year. Yet the next challenge is no longer simply putting student information online. It is making admissions, academics, registration, attendance, examinations, finance and student services work together without duplicate data, manual handoffs or conflicting records.
A modern Student Information System (SIS) and Education ERP can help change that operating model. Instead of staff repeatedly moving information between systems, institutions can create a more consistent student record, automate routine processes and give leadership better visibility into what is happening across the campus. The impact can extend from faster administrative work to more reliable academic data, easier student services and more informed decisions.
For Kazakh universities, the real opportunity is to move from a collection of digital tools to a connected digital campus one that can adapt to credit-based academic structures, integrate with existing platforms, scale with enrolment and use AI-powered analytics to turn institutional data into actionable insight.
Imagine a student changes a course after registration.
The academic office updates the record. Finance may need to check whether the change affects fees. The timetable may need adjustment, while examination eligibility and reporting could also be affected.
The university is already digital. But if these processes sit in separate systems, someone still has to connect the dots.
Kazakhstan has a mature digital education environment, with universities using platforms such as Platonus, Univer and other LMS solutions, while the Unified Higher Education Platform provides a national digital database covering institutions, programmes, faculty, students and research.
The challenge is therefore moving from digitisation to coordination.
The scale of the sector is creating more operational complexity. Alongside 678,100 students, Kazakhstan recorded 38,014 higher-education teachers at the start of 2025/26, while 115,600 students needed accommodation.
Academic models are changing too. Kazakhstan requires higher-education institutions to operate educational management information systems that include an automated system supporting credit-based learning.
AI is becoming part of the wider education conversation as well. Kazakhstan’s Ministry reported in 2025 that 95 universities had introduced AI disciplines, with 30 universities running 42 specialised AI programmes.
This creates a new requirement for student management technology: the SIS should not merely record what happened. It should be flexible enough to support how universities are changing.
The biggest problems are often found between departments rather than inside individual departments.
Fragmented student information can leave admissions, academics and finance working from different records.
Programme and course changes can trigger multiple manual updates when academic rules are not connected to downstream processes.
Credit-based academic management requires the system to understand relationships between courses, credits, prerequisites, progression and graduation.
Reporting delays occur when staff have to combine information from several platforms before leadership can trust the result.
And as universities adopt more digital systems, integration itself becomes a management issue.
A practical example makes the problem clearer. A student changes programmes from Business Management to Digital Marketing. A disconnected environment may require an administrator to update the student record, verify course eligibility, check fees, amend registration and communicate the change separately. A connected Education ERP can turn that into a controlled workflow, with the appropriate updates triggered from one approved change.
The goal is not simply fewer applications.
It is fewer manual handoffs between applications.
The right SIS is not necessarily the platform with the longest feature list. It is the one that fits the university’s academic structure, digital environment and future operating model.
A Kazakh university should evaluate whether the system can provide:
Interoperability – connect with existing institutional and national digital systems.
Academic flexibility – support programmes, credits, prerequisites and institutional rules.
A consistent student record – reduce conflicting information across departments.
Automation – remove repetitive approvals, updates and reconciliation.
Analytics and AI – help users investigate institutional trends and act on relevant information.
Scalability and security – support growth while protecting sensitive student data.
That definition is more useful than asking how many modules a vendor has.
A university should test how the SIS exchanges data with its current platforms rather than assuming it will replace everything. The important questions are which system owns each record, how information is exchanged and how conflicting updates are prevented.
The vendor should demonstrate how credits, prerequisites, course registration, progression and graduation requirements work in practice. A live scenario is more useful than a generic claim that the platform “supports credit systems.”
Ask the vendor to demonstrate this end-to-end. The university should be able to see how academic records, registration, fees, timetable information and reporting respond to an approved change without creating duplicate student records.
A student should not appear registered in one department and financially blocked in another because information was updated at different times. Integration between academic and financial workflows is especially important for institutions managing multiple fee structures or currencies.
With 678,100 students currently enrolled across Kazakhstan’s higher-education sector, scalability needs to be tested rather than assumed. Universities should test additional users, programmes, campuses, transactions and integrations before committing.
Ask where institutional data is hosted, how access is controlled, how activity is audited and what happens if the primary environment becomes unavailable. Kazakhstan’s growing focus on digital infrastructure and cybersecurity makes these operational questions increasingly important.
Give the vendor a real question such as:
“Which programmes have experienced a change in enrolment or academic performance?”
Then see whether the system can help investigate the answer using available institutional data.
Migration should include cleaning, mapping, validation and reconciliation. Moving inaccurate legacy data into a new platform simply creates a more modern version of the same problem.
| When Student Management Is Fragmented | With a Connected Education ERP |
|---|---|
| Student data is maintained across different applications | A consistent institutional student record is available to authorised teams |
| A programme change creates several manual updates | One approved change can trigger related academic workflows |
| Academic and finance teams reconcile information manually | Relevant processes can share consistent student status |
| Credit registration requires repeated checking | Academic rules can be configured into registration workflows |
| Staff prepare information from multiple sources | Connected reporting provides a clearer institutional view |
| Adding another tool creates another information gap | New systems can be evaluated around interoperability |
| Leadership receives information after manual consolidation | Analytics can provide more timely visibility for decision-making |
The objective is not simply digitalisation. It is connected digitalisation.
The National Report on the State and Development of the Higher Education System of the Republic of Kazakhstan provides a country-specific view of the structure and development of Kazakhstan’s higher-education sector. It is useful as a local reference because SIS decisions need to reflect Kazakhstan’s own institutional and policy environment rather than simply importing a global model.
Another perspective comes from TCS’s 2026 Digital Readiness and Student Experience in Higher Education study. It found that 57% of universities describe their digital proficiency as “evolving,” while 55% describe their digital student experience the same way. The study identifies fragmented technology ecosystems as one of the major digital pain points and says AI and machine learning are the leading technology investment priorities for the next two years.
For Kazakh universities, the message is relevant: digital maturity comes from how well systems work together, not from how many systems an institution owns.
De Montfort University Kazakhstan (DMUK) provides a directly relevant example.
The university operates with 1,000+ active students and 350+ courses and needed to address inconsistent departmental processes, multi-currency financial operations, manual student and academic workflows, and structured tracking of attendance, examinations, placements and completion.
Academia implemented configurable ERP capabilities covering admissions, programme and course management, online and multi-currency fees, QR attendance, examinations, placements and legacy-data migration. The case study reports stronger process alignment, reduced response time and real-time data access for leadership.
The lesson is particularly relevant to Kazakhstan:
Modernisation creates greater value when it connects processes instead of simply digitising them one at a time.
Academia brings 18 years in the education industry, 2,000+ person-years of experience, 400+ customers across 32 countries and 1M+ learners and educators empowered.
That experience matters because university systems need to accommodate changing programmes, new integrations, different operating models and growing student populations without turning every change into a custom technology project.
Academia’s Kazakhstan platform highlights 40+ modules, support for credit-based and Bologna programmes, unified student data, AI-driven reports, interactive dashboards and mobile-ready access.
The value of integration becomes clearer when thousands of records and transactions are involved.
In a leading university implementation, Academia reports that 26,247 students completed registration through the student portal in 2025. Around 15,000 students received scholarships, while approximately 70,000 financial-aid payments were processed. The same institution manages 18,000+ postgraduate supervision records and 5,700+ thesis records.
These figures belong to that specific institution and are not benchmarks for Kazakhstan. They demonstrate something more fundamental: a connected Education ERP must be able to maintain reliable relationships between large volumes of student, academic and financial information.
AI becomes more useful when the underlying data is already connected.
Consider a rector asking:
“Why has registration slowed down this semester?”
Instead of asking several departments to prepare separate reports, AI-supported analytics can help surface relevant information across enrolment, academic activity and operations.
Academia’s Kazakhstan platform includes AI-driven reports and analytics, SERA AI, an agentic AI self-enrolment bot and automated remark generation in marksheets.
The real value of AI is not producing more dashboards. It is shortening the distance between:
Question → Data → Pattern → Insight → Action
Academia brings admissions, enrolment, programme and course management, attendance, examinations, fees, student records, reporting, analytics and AI into a connected higher-education platform. Its Kazakhstan offering is designed around centralised student data, flexible academic structures, AI-driven intelligence and mobile-ready access.
For universities evaluating an Education ERP, the key step is to test those capabilities against real institutional scenarios, not simply compare feature lists.
See how Academia can help your university reduce fragmented workflows, improve student-data visibility and modernise academic and administrative operations.
An SIS manages student and academic information across processes such as admissions, registration, programmes, attendance, examinations and records. In Kazakhstan, interoperability with the wider digital higher-education environment is an important part of evaluation.
A suitable platform should be able to configure credits, prerequisites, programme structures, registration rules, progression and graduation requirements. Universities should verify these capabilities through a practical demonstration.
Integration helps reduce duplicate data entry and inconsistent records between academic, administrative and financial systems, making student management more coordinated.
AI can help analyse institutional data, surface patterns, automate selected tasks and make information easier to investigate. Its usefulness depends on the quality and connectedness of the underlying data.
They should evaluate interoperability, academic flexibility, student-data consistency, security, scalability, analytics, migration and implementation support against real university workflows.
It can connect academic and administrative processes, automate repetitive work, centralise student information and provide analytics that give staff and leadership better visibility across the institution.
Experience Academia – Your partner in transforming campus operations, a trusted all-in-one ERP/SIS solution.
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