Overview
Liaison International provides software and data solutions for higher education institutions, with a focus on streamlining admissions, enrollment, and academic program management. Newfire has been a long-term partner in building and evolving Liaison’s platforms — most notably including recent innovations that embed AI into the admissions lifecycle, such as intelligent applicant review, natural language interfaces, and AI-driven workflow automation.
Our work with Liaison reflects what a decade of partnership makes possible: moving beyond platform delivery to embed AI into the admissions lifecycle, easing review burden and strengthening institutional decision-making.
Stephen S. Hau, Chairman and CEO of Newfire Global Partners
Background
Liaison operates multiple platforms that support colleges, universities, and professional programs across North America. To maintain its market leadership, Liaison sought to modernize user experiences and embed AI capabilities that would help institutions make faster, fairer, and more holistic admissions decisions.
Challenge
Higher education admissions teams were increasingly overwhelmed by application volume and complexity. Manually reviewing unstructured content such as portfolios, essays, and references consumed time and limited reviewers’ ability to focus on holistic evaluation. Liaison needed a way to apply AI to reduce review burden, enhance reviewer decision-making, and improve applicant experience.
Project Scope
Newfire contributed dedicated, full-stack engineering and AI/ML expertise across the following initiatives:
- Application summarization: AI-generated applicant summaries for reviewers
- Reference summarization: Tool to extract key points from recommendation letters
- Natural language search: AI-driven filtering across complex application data
- Transcript extraction: AI for automated parsing of academic transcripts
- Resume generation: Drafting resumes from applicant profile data
- Agentic workflows: Natural-language task management for institutional users
- Conversational analytics: Queryable application data insights
- Cloud integration: Amazon Bedrock-based AI service enablement
The Solution
Newfire partnered closely with Liaison’s leadership and internal teams to help design, prototype, and deliver AI features across Liaison’s platforms. Production features like Application Summary are now rolling out in beta to select institutions, while others such as Knowledge Chat and Natural Language Search are actively progressing through validation and user testing. The teams maintained alignment through agile co-delivery, shared backlogs, and QBRs.
Results & Impact
The AI-enabled features are expected to reduce reviewer time-per-applicant, increase fairness through standardized insights, and reduce administrative overhead by automating repetitive workflows. As tools like conversational search and transcript parsing enter production, admissions teams will be empowered to make more informed decisions faster, while institutions retain control of data privacy and review policies.
Liaison's long-term and innovative partnership with Newfire has turned AI from a buzzword into mission-critical capability across our clients’ enrollment, admissions and retention lifecycles.
George Haddad, Founder & CEO, Liaison International
The Ongoing Partnership
Liaison and Newfire have worked together for over 10 years, beginning with platform support and evolving into a strategic innovation partnership. Today, Newfire continues to serve as a trusted engineering and AI development partner across Liaison’s global initiatives.
Work With Us
We help institutions and EdTech leaders embed AI into mission-critical workflows. If you’re modernizing your learning or enrollment platform, let’s talk!
