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By Dishant Kharbanda
Every technology cycle produces the same anxious question about the humans in the room. Right now, in international education, that question is being asked about counsellors. Will AI replace the person who sits across the table from a student and their family? The honest answer is no, but the reason is more interesting than the reassurance itself.
The Part of Counselling AI Was Built to Solve
AI is exceptionally good at the part of counselling that was never really about counselling. Matching a transcript to an admission threshold, cross-referencing scholarships against a profile, flagging a visa document gap: these are pattern-recognition problems, and pattern recognition is precisely what large-scale models are built for.
Students have already made this judgement themselves. Research from IDP Education’s mid-2025 global survey of nearly 7,900 prospective and current students found that more than half planned to use AI tools such as ChatGPT to decide which institution to apply to, and a similar share to decide their programme of study. Among Indian students specifically, adoption has moved even faster: a Leap Scholar analysis spanning three million student records between 2020 and 2025 found that around three in four Indian students are now using AI tools to help shape their study-abroad decisions.
That is not a threat signal. It is a delegation signal.
What Students Are Actually Delegating
Students are outsourcing the research layer of decision-making so they can spend more time on the parts that actually require judgement: comparing trade-offs, weighing risk, understanding what a decision will feel like two years in. That is the layer counsellors have always been better positioned to own, and the data backs the shift rather than undermines it.
Global data from the International Student Barometer, drawn from over 100,000 student responses, found near-universal positive sentiment toward AI-based tools in education, though regional patterns still differ in how and how often students actually use them. Enthusiasm for the tool is not the same as trust in it to make the final call. Students appear to want AI to do the first ninety per cent of the search, and a human to help them with the last, hardest ten per cent.
Why the Human Conversation Has Not Gone Away
The counselling relationship itself confirms this. Industry data from the American International Recruitment Council [AIRC] shows that 44 per cent of international students still rely on a recruitment agent or counsellor to help decide what and where to study. What has shifted is the reason they walk into that conversation.
Career outcomes, cited by 67 per cent of students in IDP’s research, now drive the decision more than the degree itself. That is a harder conversation than “which university has the higher ranking.” It requires reading a family’s risk appetite, a student’s unspoken hesitation, the gap between what a parent wants and what a nineteen-year-old actually wants. No model reads a room. A counsellor does. And as decisions get more consequential, tied to five-figure investments, visa policy volatility, and a student’s early career trajectory, that reading matters more, not less.
The Right Architecture: Pre-Processing and Judgement
The mistake is framing this as AI versus counsellor. The more accurate framing is AI as the pre-processing layer and the counsellor as the judgement layer.
Let the machine compress weeks of research, shortlisting, scholarship matching, document tracking, into minutes. Let the human spend those reclaimed minutes on the conversation that actually changes an outcome: whether a student is choosing a country for the right reasons, whether a family understands the real cost of a decision beyond tuition, whether the “safe” choice on paper is the right choice for that particular person.
By the numbers
Key figures from this story- 75%
- Indian students using AI for study-abroad decisions
- 44%
- International students still relying on counsellors
- 67%
- Students citing career outcomes as primary driver
This is not a new pattern in how technology reshapes expert professions. Every tool that automates the mechanical work of a field has historically pushed the humans in that field toward the judgement work, the work that was always harder to standardise and always the actual point of hiring an expert in the first place. Counselling is following the same arc.
What Gets Redefined, Not Eliminated
Technologies that automate the mechanical and elevate the human rarely eliminate the profession they touch. They redefine what the profession is for.
Counselling is not becoming obsolete. It is becoming more concentrated, less about retrieving information that a model can now retrieve faster and more cheaply, and more about the judgement no dataset can fully hold: knowing which of three viable paths actually fits the person sitting across the table.
That distinction, between information and judgement, is where the next decade of this profession will be built.
The author is chief innovation officer, Crizac and author of Hacked by History: Seven Secrets for Dominating the Age of AI. Views are personal.
