Dreamforce 2025 | Chris Campbell, DeVry University

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Chris Campbell

CIO

DeVry University

play_circle_outline Empowering Adult Learners: DeVry University's Mission and Salesforce's 24/7 Support Solutions to Close Opportunity Gaps

play_circle_outline Enhancing Student Success: Salesforce's Impact on DeVry's Education and AI-Driven Persistence Strategies

play_circle_outline Enhancing Accessibility: AI's Role in Supporting Students with Special Needs and the Preference for Digital Agents Over Human Advisors

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Chris Campbell, DeVry University

Chris Campbell

CIO DeVry University

In this Dreamforce interview, Chris Campbell, chief information officer of DeVry University, joins theCUBE’s John Furrier and Gemma Allen to unpack how DeVry is operationalizing Salesforce’s agentic capabilities to support a 24/7 adult-learner population. Campbell explains how the university’s cloud-first shift set the stage for leveraging Agentforce to extend support when advisors and faculty are offline, while preserving human-in-the-loop handoffs with full context for complex needs. He shares measurable outcomes tied to persistence and retention, including... Read more

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What are the challenges faced by DeVry in supporting adult learners and how is Salesforce and Agentforces being used to address those challenges? add

What are the benefits related to student persistence and retention observed in the DeVryPro platform? add

What are some examples of how AI is creating a more level playing field for students with additional support requirements? add

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Chris Campbell, DeVry University

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>> Welcome back, everyone. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, here with my co-host, Gemma Allen. We are here breaking down Salesforce's Dreamforce 2025, live here in San Francisco, California, where all the action is around AI infrastructure that's enabling Agentforce, agent infrastructure, and of course, agents doing productivity. We got a great guest here, customer of Salesforce, Chris Campbell, CEO of DeVry University. Chris, thanks for coming on, theCUBE. Appreciate you spending the time coming on. Multi-decade customer of Salesforce.

Chris Campbell

>> Right. Thank you very much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

>> So, we're seeing a lot of the use cases, the clear visibility and the line of sight and some of the value of the data. Your use case is phenomenally relevant because you have a use case, 24-7 education, a lot of people connecting at different times. You got a lot of data. Talk about what you guys are doing and how you're using Salesforce and how you are set up for the agent run.

Chris Campbell

>> Sure. You start thinking about DeVry's mission, which is really we're all about closing an opportunity gap for our learners, helping them thrive in careers where the technological change is dramatic and continuous. And so, when you think about that, we need to support them in a 24-7 world. They are adult students. They are needing support when much of our infrastructure, our advisors, our faculty are offline. And how do we do that? So, Agentforces is really, really helping us perform those tasks, right?

>> As a CIO, chief information officer, not a chief investment officer, there's two CIOs, as I learned as I moved to New York, the old-school way was, "Hey, let's get some gear. Let's get a data center. Put some applications out there. Wait for the refreshes." Then, you got all this data coming in, you got a little silo over here. Now, the world is expecting to have a lot of data available. As a CIO, what is the key view from your perspective on how the world's evolving for taking advantage of agentic infrastructure, agentic platforms? Because clearly, we'll dig into some of the use cases, there's obvious advantages. We've been laying them out all week here and on theCUBE, the past two years. What's your perspective as a CIO?

Chris Campbell

>> Yeah, as a CIO, first, I think the days of the CIO that's just the guy going out and buying servers and standing them up, I think those are long gone, right? We have to be able to strategize with the business units that we support, and it's no different at DeVry. From our perspective, we've been on a journey transforming our infrastructure from premise-based things to SaaS-based. So, we've been following the cloud journey, which I think, interestingly, has set us up to really take advantage of this new world, where you have the Salesforces of the world that are creating these agentic capabilities that we can use, that we can rent. We don't have to go all the way down to the servers and provide capacity, et cetera. So, it's a real enabler and it allows us to put solutions in place, measured in weeks and months, versus years, right?

Gemma Allen

>> Let's talk a little bit about human agency in the education space. I think it's such an important topic and something that really gets a little bit of confused narrative right now. Is AI going to make us smarter or is AI going to make us lazier? And I think in the education space, that's a huge question. What has the experience been like for DeVry? How have you guys seen that play out for your students? How has it been used across their learning experience?

Chris Campbell

>> 100%. We look at every aspect of our learner experience to see how and where and if we should employ AI against that. Our view of the world though, is what I would say very leading in higher education. We believe each and every role, everybody in their career is going to need to learn to use AI to become more effective, more efficient, a stronger participant in delivering value. We don't think AI specifically is going to necessarily take somebody's job, but the person next to you that learns how to use it better than you do, they may indeed. And so, we work hard to... In fact, it's exciting. We've committed that by June we will have applied AI literacy in each and every course, no matter what your program. So, as a CIO, how exciting. I know that we're going to be getting all of these people coming out of DeVry University that have all these skills that typically you might only find in an IT department, and we're going to find them in finance and HR and everywhere else. What a powerful enabler.

>> Now, they're AI-natives coming into the workforce, young and old by the way. There's a cultural intersection. It's not just the young guns, the new guard, the new students. A lot of learners are either retraining. I mean, how much of that is going on?

Chris Campbell

>> Yeah, so for DeVry, our particular learners that we work with, about 83% of them are older than 25 years old, and half of them are parents. 100% of them are holding down full-time jobs. They need to be able to do their work after hours, they need to be able to re-skill and career change. When you think about it, about a third of our students are seeking to enhance or accelerate their existing career, but another third are seeking to completely switch and pivot their career. So, you think about that, that's not traditional university. They're not stopping out to go to a campus and have that experience. These are-

>> Talk about Salesforce, why that's attractive? Because one, I can see them contributing to the education programs. Who doesn't want to learn about agents? I mean, like you said, learning AI will give you a competitive advantage, but they're now two years into... This is their second year of Agentforce. Clearly, middle of the fairway, plane is off the runway, whatever you want to say, it's working. How does that apply to you guys? What use cases are flowering up from that enablement? Can you share any stories of where you see the benefit and thoughts around how you want to double down on the wins?

Chris Campbell

>> Yeah, so we are already seeing benefits that we can tie directly ROI to both persistence and retention of students, both key things for delivering value in their lives and, frankly, value to the university. We have leveraged agents on our new DeVryPro platform, which is a continuing professional education platform that delivers stackable credentials and AI-powered. And there's agents there that are doing the entire process from helping you decide which of the courses might work best for you, to helping you get enrolled, helping engage you to continue driving you forward in these self-paced learning. We're seeing really great success there. On the other side, we're seeing really great success helping our students get started in their academic journey. We know orientation is super important and we've leveraged the Data 360, it's called now, Data 360, along with AI to really increase the participation that students are putting into their orientation, which has driven up their persistence and success. And also, has helped us save well over 500 hours of efficiency in a year. So, we are really bullish on what's going on, but it does require us to reimagine-

>> So, you're hitting all your metrics so there's not a lot of... I mean, there's enthusiasm?

Chris Campbell

>> Yeah, 100%. We're excited about it.

Gemma Allen

>> What capabilities are you seeing as very quick effect? What's having immediate impact? Is it around personalization? Is it around recommendations? Where do you see the student and learning experience really benefiting from AI? And especially from agentic AI and this new thesis that we're on?

Chris Campbell

>> Yeah, I think there's two sides of it, right? There's stuff that we're doing with Salesforce and certainly things we're doing without, but let's talk about on the Salesforce side. Our ability to provide the student with the information they need within the student portal all the time, and to be able to suggest to them things that they can do to do better, have better success, help them develop their learning skills, their education skills. Those are really powerful scenarios, and we believe that it's a core part to what we do. The other thing that's so powerful that people overlook is that when the agent identifies that it's a more complex problem, that it knows what to deal with, it can hand it to one of our just really great advisors with the complete context of the situation so they can pick up the phone, get the student what they need really quick and get them back on their journey. It's powerful. The seamlessness that Salesforce affords us through this platform is truly remarkable.

>> One of the things that's coming out at Dreamforce, at least from my perspective and observation, we've talked about on theCUBE and reported on Siliconangle.com fast, but it's clear that probabilistic non-deterministic approach, because we're in a generative process, is great. Now, but with agents and fleet of agents, as they call them here, there's handoffs. So, let's just say I don't know what I want to do and I want to go on vacation where I want to go... I found my place, and now I go into a deterministic workflow. I book a flight, I hit a payment rail. That's the future of agents. Okay, Gem. Let's apply that to learning, online learning, you also have analytics.

Chris Campbell

>> Oh, yeah.

>> You have analytics. So, I don't know what I want to study. There's studies out of Stanford that show that people learn differently. They struggle, but once they break through, they accelerate, might change course. So, are you looking at the analytics? And your core base analytics, you mentioned some of the business metrics. Are there analytics that you're mining from the customer data, which is the students and now usage data, which could be non-deterministic, probabilistic, to deterministic? I mean, kind of a nerd question, but I wanted to get it out there.

Chris Campbell

>> Yeah. I think what I would tell you is for a long time DeVry University has been big users of analytics to help inform the learner's journey and opportunities for us to enhance it or make it better on their behalf, oftentimes when they don't even know they really need that assistance or that little nudge. So, we've been using various probabilistic and other types of predictive analytics to help us identify students that are at risk, students that need a little bit of extra help, inform our faculty, inform our advisors. Often sending electronic nudges across multiple streams. And it gets even better because with the AI components, Einstein, AgentForce, fill in the blank from Salesforce, we're able to not just identify that the student needs a little help or maybe just needs a little celebration, could be either, but we're also able to identify what modality they're going to want it from. Are they text? Are they push? Are they email? And what time is the right time to send it? I want to send it to you just before you start working on your homework for the night, because that's when you'll see it at the top of your inbox. If I send it to you in the morning while you're working all day, it's at the bottom of the inbox. So, if you think through that, we're using data in every aspect of the journey.

>> So, it makes the agents smarter?

Chris Campbell

>> Way smarter, yeah.

Gemma Allen

>> And you mentioned students that need that little bit of help, and I think that's one of the great advantages and promises of AI is this idea of accessibility and usability for people who have sometimes been left behind by systems of the past. I'd love to hear some examples of how AI is creating more of a level playing field for students with additional support requirements. How are you seeing it play out across your campuses?

Chris Campbell

>> Yeah, so from our perspective, the agent that we've been working on most recently is within our student portal, and we think it's a great leveler. It really helps the students, provide them all the information that sometimes they could only get off the phone with an advisor. We try hard to make the technology disappear in the background a little bit, so the students are able to have a conversation with a digital agent. And one of the unique phenomena that we're seeing is that students often prefer to talk to a digital agent versus a real agent, right? It's very interesting. We're very proud at DeVry at the care that we provide via our faculty and advisors, but this is a step change. We really think it's going to be different. We're using it for use cases, like suggesting to a student that, "We noticed how you did on your last test. Did you know we have free tutoring available for you? And here, let me help you set up an appointment." They are more likely to use tutoring through a digital agency than they are from a human agency suggesting it to them. It's an interesting phenomena for years.

Gemma Allen

>> Wow, that's fascinating. Maybe it's the anonymity of it, right? Maybe it's like a lesser sense of embarrassment or something asking for help when you feel it's not a human on the other end. So, that is so interesting.

Chris Campbell

>> I think so.

>> Well, you got a great mission. I love online. You look at everyone's learning process these days, online, YouTube, peer review, social, trust networks are forming. Any vision you have as a CIO to try to... I mean, you're just skating with the puck with Agentforce, but skating to where the puck will go. What's next? What do you see that you have your eye on in the future to bring these worlds together to create the ideal learning environment, to enable that? What's on your mind?

Chris Campbell

>> I think hyper-personalization within the learning experience is something that we're thinking about. Imagine if the three of us are all going to get our MBA, and you're in journalism, maybe you're in finance and I'm an IT person. We're all taking the same course from the same faculty member perhaps. But wouldn't it be interesting if we could deliver your capstone that was relevant to you, relevant to you, relevant to me? All of us have a slightly different view from the faculty side, though they're basically grading the same outcomes. They're looking at the same thing. So, in effect, we believe AI is going to allow us to, just in time, personalize your learning experience relevant to your career and aspirations in such a way to help that learning be so much more personal because we know that is a secret sauce.

>> It's generative education with AI.

Chris Campbell

>> That's right. Yeah, that's right.

>> Chris, thanks for coming on. I really appreciate it.

Chris Campbell

>> Oh, thank you for having me. I really enjoyed the conversation.

>> Okay. I'm John Furrier with Gemma Allen. We're here at Dreamforce, streaming live, bringing you all the action. Hopefully educating you on all the greatness happening here at Dreamforce on theCUBE. Thanks for watching.