AI Agents Generating 2,000+ School Reports in Minutes

Our client is the New Zealand government's external education evaluation agency, responsible for monitoring and evaluating the effectiveness of educational institutions including primary schools, secondary schools, and early learning centres. Through this work, the agency helps institutions identify areas for improvement and increase the effectiveness of engagement with whānau, iwi, and wider communities.

With a small team of data analysts serving the insight needs of hundreds of evaluation partners, the agency's data capabilities needed to be reliable, efficient, and secure. However, previous internal attempts to stand up a data platform had been unsuccessful, stalling due to budget constraints and limited in-house capability.

The agency needed to demonstrate real value from any investment quickly, in order to justify ongoing commitment in a challenging public sector economic climate.

DataSing began discussions with the client in 2023 and commenced formal delivery in early 2024. We provisioned our Tūī cloud platform on our own Azure tenancy, providing a managed service that included storage, warehousing, ingestion, machine learning components, and an R Studio environment for the data analyst team.

We developed a fit-for-purpose reference data architecture and worked with the client to create a data analytics roadmap, giving both parties visibility of the horizon. We established data engineering pipelines from key government data sources and built ingestion mechanisms for the client to onboard data through self-service interfaces.

Our first major use case was the automated generation of school report summaries. Using the Tūī platform, we collated key attributes from both the agency's own datasets and external government data into a manageable structure, developed rule logic, and generated hundreds of school reports as PDFs in minutes.

We provided extensive support during the agency's first data capability certification and accreditation process, including security risk assessments and privacy impact assessments. We also established monthly commercial governance and weekly operational meetings to manage priorities and keep things aligned.

We provisioned the platform for business use within eight weeks of contract signing, including all inputs into the certification and accreditation process and technical architecture governance approval. This allowed the agency to develop insights at scale for the first time.

The school report solution has reduced report generation time by over 50%. More than 2,000 school report summaries are now produced in minutes. Previously, this took over a month for just a small subset. This solution was presented to the agency's chief executive for demonstration to senior government officials.

Since commencing operations, we have recorded zero high-severity incidents. The agency's data literacy has improved considerably, with staff now undertaking basic enhancements and changes with minimal oversight from DataSing.

As a reflection of the value we deliver, we have secured a multi-year agreement to provide platform services and major enhancements. The client has also benefited from our research and development into AI, with AI agents currently being promoted to production.