Elige Educar 'Kai' — AI counsellor for higher-education career guidance in Chile (IDB RCT)

Elige Educar's 'Quiero Ser Profe' programme provides personalised WhatsApp-based counselling to Chilean secondary students considering teaching as a career. In 2024, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) partnered with Elige Educar to pilot 'Kai', a generative-AI WhatsApp chatbot designed to replicate the personalised guidance of skilled human counsellors at much lower cost and at scale, adapting to student responses to provide tailored information about teaching careers, application processes and scholarships.

A pre-registered RCT during the 2024–25 Chilean university admissions cycle enrolled over 43,000 secondary students across three arms: the Kai AI chatbot, human Elige Educar counsellors, and a no-intervention control. Kai achieved a higher initiation rate (35% of assigned students began a conversation) than human counsellors (28%), suggesting the AI lowered psychological barriers to engagement. However, conversations with Kai were markedly shorter (mean 3.7 messages per student) than with human counsellors (mean 5.9 messages), and the IDB evaluation concluded the AI chatbot was cheaper and more scalable but less impactful per interaction, owing to limited conversational depth and personalisation. Enrolment and career-choice outcomes for the full cohort had not yet been published as of mid-2026.

This RCT is one of the most rigorously evaluated AI counselling pilots in Latin America. Its candid findings — that AI can extend reach while trading depth for breadth — offer replicable insights for any jurisdiction facing a shortage of qualified student counsellors.