Bridging the Gap in Higher Education: A Comprehensive Review of AI-Based Academic Advising Frameworks

Abstract

It is elementary for the guidance of students by the academic advisor as it denotes the correct path, career development, and the academic expedition. Mostly traditional advising tools, however, they cannot respond to the needs of the escalating student population such as valuation, time cut, and individualized support. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as a transformative solution not only in terms of its advances in automated, data-driven, and personalized advice solutions. This paper offers a critical review of the potential and the implementation of AI in academic advising by mainly looking from the expert systems, machine learning models to conversational AI tools like chatbots. The use of AI systems can support the management staff by providing them with the alerting mechanism at the right time, making them able to forecast the students' performance, and giving them support whenever the students are in continuous studies. However, the growth trend of AI has been progressing, but even so, the popularity is not very high yet. Moreover, the issues such as the unplanned way of AI technology utilization, lack of personalization, apprehension about data ownership, and the possibility of difficulties in coupling on-the-ground applications with institutional databases are among the most prominent. This paper recognizes some of the problems and examines the potential directions such as multimodal AI integration, adaptive learning analytics, and ethical AI practices. In addition, it supports the concept of a human-and-AI team where AI serves as an addition to the human advisors for creating a complete student support experience. Tackling these drawbacks is something that academia can undertake to enhance the quality of life, which leads to education being a pursuit among the students and hence academic success for all. This overall presentation is an extensive survey of the AI-driven counselling solutions that suggest areas that could be investigated and expanded in higher education as well.