Bringing AI-Driven Insights to Education: Welbee's Partnership with Rittman Analytics

The Download

Welbee is a multi-award-winning company offering tools and surveys designed to help schools assess and improve the wellbeing of their staff. Using survey data, Welbee delivers actionable insights that empower schools across the UK to implement strategies that foster thriving educational environments.

Using a systematic approach they call "The Welbee Way," they guide schools to measure, act on, and embed wellbeing into their culture. Their new Edu Intelligence platform enables schools to create, run, and analyse surveys for their staff, students and parents, providing a comprehensive view of wellbeing across the whole school community.

The Challenge

When we caught up with the Welbee team, their goal was to deliver the same award-winning insights and recommendations from their Wellbeing Survey within the Edu Intelligence platform. Their staff wellbeing survey was already highly successful, but their process relied on manual analysis and interpretation of survey results, causing delays for schools eager to act on their data. Welbee saw an opportunity to make their data more accessible and actionable for their users.

Welbee also wanted to empower schools with more dynamic and interactive ways to explore their data beyond static charts and traditional reporting methods. By leveraging AI, Welbee aimed to create a conversational experience that could uncover hidden trends and deliver actionable, data-driven recommendations for improvement.

With an existing Looker platform in place, Welbee sought to integrate this new AI-powered analysis into a chatbot interface. This approach would ensure a seamless and intuitive user experience within a familiar environment.

The Solution

To address Welbee's goals, they partnered with us to develop an AI-powered proof of concept (POC) that integrated AI-driven insights into their Edu Intelligence platform. This POC laid the groundwork for Intelligent Ed, an AI-powered staff wellbeing assistant designed specifically for the education sector.

The POC solution was made-up of three core components:

• AI-Driven Pre-Analysis: This component automated survey data processing using Google BigQuery, and Vertex AI. It leveraged Google's Gemini 1.5 large language model (LLM) to generate insights and highlight differences between subgroups within survey respondents.
• Text-to-SQL Chatbot: Rittman Analytics used Langchain and Langsmith to develop a text-to-SQL agent that allowed users to query survey data conversationally. The agent interpreted natural language questions, broke them down into relevant components, and generated SQL queries to retrieve data from BigQuery.
• RAG Integration: This component integrated Welbee's existing RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) system with the chatbot, as part of a wider LangGraph implementation. RAG enhanced the chatbot's responses by retrieving relevant contextual information from external knowledge sources.

Built on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) technology, Welbee's survey data was stored and processed in BigQuery while Vertex AI provided the machine learning capabilities for AI-driven pre-analysis and natural language understanding for the chatbot.

Faster, More Actionable Insights

"Rittman Analytics' expertise in AI and Google Cloud allowed us to help our customers unlock the true potential of their data, delivering faster, more actionable insights. The Rittman team is a pleasure to work with, and they have a great level of knowledge, skill, and expertise in all things data analytics. We are thrilled with the results of this project and look forward to continuing to work with the Rittman team in the future"
- Tim Handley, Chief Product and Technology Officer, Welbee

Benefits Delivered

The collaborative nature of the project leveraged the combined expertise of Rittman Analytics in AI and Google Cloud Platform with Welbee's in-depth knowledge of their platform and users' needs, delivering the following benefits to the business:

• Faster Time to Insights: The AI-driven pre-analysis eliminates manual analysis and provides insights immediately upon survey closure, allowing schools to act on their data more quickly, leading to faster improvements in staff well-being.
• Enhanced User Experience: The Text-to-SQL chatbot enables users to interact with their data conversationally and obtain insights in real-time without needing technical expertise.
• Deeper and More Actionable Insights: The combination of AI-powered analysis and RAG integration provides richer context and surfaces hidden trends that might be missed with traditional reporting.
• Competitive Advantage: Intelligent Ed, its underlying concepts proven by this POC, will position Welbee as an innovator in the education technology sector by offering a cutting-edge solution that sets them apart from competitors.