How Two People Built an AI Tool for 15,000 Students


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Mar 27 2025 43 mins   13

Yet again, Dan and Ray are the podcast hosts, but Ray’s AI digital twin introduces the episode!

This week's guests are:
Lee Barrett – Prompt Engineer and AI Advocate at CEnet.

Prem Radhakrishnan – AI Technical Manager at CEnet.

This episode is a two-level deep dive into the development and deployment of CEchat, an AI-powered chatbot designed to reduce teacher workload and enhance student learning across Catholic schools in Australia.

Part 1 of the episode covers the vision, pedagogy, and implementation strategy with both Lee and Prem.

Part 2 is a more technical discussion between Dan and Prem, covering codebase customisation, infrastructure, scale, security, and integration.

CEchat is an extended school-level implementation of Cogniti, the multi-award-winning open source chatbot from The University of Sydney. We interviewed Danny Liu about the project in this episode: https://aipodcast.education/the-university-of-sydneys-cogniti-ai-bot

They also discussed the Rome Call for AI Ethics, which you'll find here: https://www.romecall.org/