MBA Discovery in the AI Era with the University of Kansas
Co-hosted by Andrea Gilbert and Rhea Vitalis
With special guest Dave Hunt, Director of Enrollment Marketing at the University of Kansas
Listen on: YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music
Episode Overview
In Part 1 of First Movers, we sit down with Dave Hunt, Director of Enrollment Marketing at the University of Kansas (KU), to explore how AI and zero-click discovery are changing the way students find and choose programs, and what differentiation looks like when machines—not humans—are doing the first round of evaluation. With more than a decade of partnership under our belt, Everspring led a full overhaul of the KU online MBA experience in April to meet AI-driven discovery head-on, rebuilding pages around intent-rich, answer-first content structured for both humans and large language models. Together, we unpack what’s shifting in student behavior, why the funnel is collapsing, and how enrollment teams can adapt their content strategy to stay visible, credible, and relevant in the AI era.
Key Takeaways
- AI is rewriting discovery: Large language models are now doing the “evaluation” work students used to do on program websites.
- Differentiation still wins: But it has to show up inside AI answers and zero-click environments, not just on your site.
- Question-led content drives visibility: KU’s online MBA redesign shows how intent-rich, answer-first pages perform in AI discovery.
- Structure is as important as story: Even great content won’t surface if it isn’t organized for machines to crawl and understand.
- Enrollment funnels are collapsing: Stealth apps and off-channel research mean teams need to adapt faster and meet students where they are.
Transcript
Opening and introductions
Rhea Vitalis (Everspring): Welcome to First Movers, a PulseCheck series from Enrollify brought to you by Everspring. Everspring is a digital and AI enablement company helping colleges and universities solve urgent challenges and capture new market opportunity.
We’re excited to have Dave Hunt, Director of Enrollment Marketing at the University of Kansas. Everspring and KU have worked together for over a decade. Dave’s a storyteller at heart, with experience in award-winning broadcast journalism and enrollment marketing leadership roles at Arizona State, Rockhurst, and now KU.
Andrea Gilbert is also joining us. Andrea is Everspring SVP of Partner and Solutions Marketing, with two decades of higher-ed agency experience and early admissions work at Illinois Institute of Technology.
I’m Rhea Vitalis, your host. I lead AI research at Everspring to bring performance trends to teams navigating change.
Let’s jump in.
Differentiation in an AI-first search world (02:51)
Rhea Vitalis: Since we last spoke, search behavior has evolved. ChatGPT, AI Overviews, and Google are changing how students get information. How has your thinking about differentiation evolved?
Dave Hunt (KU): Differentiation is still the name of the game. Prospective students usually come down to a handful of factors.
The internet has always been a place where people have a question and want an answer. Before AI, somebody would Google, get a list of websites, then go to the most authoritative one and scroll to find the answer.
Even before AI, zero-click searches were rising. People were trying to get answers from results pages without clicking. This is the next evolution.
We used to think about differentiating the value prop on our website and creating content so we rank high. Then the website does the work—design, UX, giving answers to different audiences and getting them to take action.
AI changes the process. The goal is still to provide a differentiated message and get action. But now students aren’t coming to our website to evaluate. The models are doing that human evaluation for them.
We still have to create the message and the authoritative answer so models surface it. What I haven’t figured out is the next step: once they’ve gotten that answer, how do we drive action—inquiry to apply, admit to deposit. I don’t see that as part of the model process yet. That’s a challenge we have to solve.
Using AI to scale without losing the story (06:37)
Rhea Vitalis: Attribution breaks down when discovery happens so early in the journey. The funnel has collapsed to some degree. Your team creates assets across channels, but AI is fragmenting where students research. How do you build content that performs across surfaces and meet students at different stages of their research process without overwhelming a small team?
Dave Hunt (07:38): You leverage AI where it makes sense. I’m not saying “AI, write me a 10-email drip series.” It’ll get things wrong or pull stats that aren’t relevant.
AI helps with efficiency. You can use it for inspiration with proper prompts—clear audience, action, and stories you want to tell, and it can give you ideas. Or you do the work first and use AI to optimize.
Resources are always tight. If a tool takes something that used to take a full day and compresses it to half a day, that matters.
Dave Hunt (10:06): Scaling is another area we encourage. We’ll have a piece of content designed as long-form, like a YouTube video. The easiest path is to place it everywhere as-is, but it won’t perform. A two-minute YouTube video won’t work the same on Instagram.
AI can help take source material and recreate it for different channels and audiences, or at least provide guidance. You already did the work to make the source of truth. AI helps curate for other formats.
What worries people is “have AI do the whole thing.” I’m passionate that the story still has to come from us. We know the stories and the people. AI can help us adapt it so we don’t spend four hours manually reshaping for every channel.
KU online MBA microsite redesign and results (12:39)
Rhea Vitalis: Andrea, can you walk through the KU online MBA website overhaul Everspring led in April? How did the changing student journey inform the content?
Andrea Gilbert (Everspring) (13:16): The April redesign focused on depth—content that answers questions students ask through AI and search. Differentiation depends on being discoverable and helpful when students ask questions, not just when they search.
For KU that meant answering AI-driven questions with clear, authentic answers.
Since April, the microsite has generated about 42% more AI-driven traffic than other KU domains we evaluated. It’s been cited in 120+ AI Overview results, nearly three times more than other KU domains.
We restructured information to be more machine-readable so tools can find content and surface it in answers. We’ve tracked ongoing refreshes, SEO, analytics, optimization.
The microsite now triggers AI Overviews for 34% of its ranking keywords—74% higher than the School of Business in general.
One example: an AI-focused leadership content cluster has driven about 5,300 organic clicks YTD and earned 28 AI Overview citations for searches like “characteristics of a leader.” Students were looking for those searches, but old content wasn’t surfacing.
We scaled intent-driven themes without overextending internal resources, and the same approach carried into social and email. Messaging is more conversational and human, supported by tools like live chat and appointment scheduling. It has to be integrated—not just web or social alone—and the updates are paying forward.
Why structure and technical optimization matter (17:08)
Rhea Vitalis: We talk a lot about technical optimization so machines can crawl and understand content. Long-tail queries are becoming full paragraphs, and machines run micro-searches behind the scenes. How you structure and cluster content helps AI understand how content is interconnected.
Andrea Gilbert (17:21): Exactly.
Dave Hunt (18:08): That behind-the-scenes technical element is something the average person doesn’t do on a day-to-day basis. A key role for me is explaining that content has to be structured in certain ways so the story gets out to the people we’re trying to reach.
People within individual units, whether it’s the school of business or admissions teams, know their stories better than I do. They’re passionate about them. I want to help tell those stories on the website, but it needs to be structured the right way. Otherwise we’ll tell the story and nobody will hear it.
You have to do both elements together—great story and proper structure—that’s where the magic happens.
AI interception, zero-click, and stealth apps (20:17)
Rhea Vitalis: Organic searches are being intercepted about a third of the time by AI summaries. KU’s online MBA site shows up in AI summaries four times more often than other university sites.
Andrea, how did you approach building in this shifting journey?
Andrea Gilbert (21:28): It changes every day. We had a roadmap based on historical performance, focusing on content development and architecture. Students are more self-directed. We needed to understand intent specific to KU—what questions are students asking and why—then answer clearly and conversationally.
We watch performance, tweak, and adjust. We’ve already seen increases in cited URLs and a 42% lift in AI-driven traffic.
The takeaway is focusing on clarity, structure, and authority rather than volume. Over time it compounds. We’re seeing nearly 40% YoY traffic increase to the microsite, and we still have to follow students through conversion.
Search as earned media (23:30)
Dave Hunt: Digital marketing let us send a message and lead directly to action. Before the internet we relied on paid and earned media, impressions, awareness, and affinity.
With zero-click rising, I wonder if search is evolving back toward earned media. We earn being the curated answer. Students may not take action right then, but we’ve given an impression and shaped their view of the brand. Action may happen later.
Andrea Gilbert (25:21): I agree. Student behavior will force us there. Big companies will still want revenue, so they’ll figure out how to play with LLMs and organic. In the meantime we have to show up where students are. And tomorrow it’ll be different.
How student behavior is shifting on the ground (27:39)
Rhea Vitalis: We’re seeing “stealth apps”—students arriving more informed but less trackable. Have you seen this?
Dave Hunt: Every class is different, and funnel changes are happening faster. A few things:
- Institutions are using AI to make faster admissions decisions. Students have grown up expecting speed — the “Amazonification” of the world. They want to know quickly if they got in. Speed to lead and speed to admit matter.
- We’re seeing changes in campus visits. Visits used to be pre-application. Now it’s shifting to post-admit. Some students even use orientation as the final evaluation, which is wild because they’ve already paid a deposit.
It means institutions have to evolve quickly. Students are evolving on their own. If we don’t meet them where they are, we’ll be left in the dust.
Advice to enrollment and marketing leaders (31:23)
Rhea Vitalis: What advice would you give other leaders right now?
Dave Hunt (31:58): The institutions we look to as exemplars—Southern New Hampshire, Arizona State, others—were willing to buck trends and reimagine what they could be. That takes initiative and bravery.
At KU, when I started in 2024, enrollment marketing was a new department. We could’ve done things the same way. That would’ve been easier. But markets were changing underneath us. We looked for opportunities to do things differently to meet students where they are.
Commit to a strategy you believe in, but keep evolving it as you learn. Communicate the “why” to partners. Change is hard. Bringing people along creates buy-in and success.
Everyone has an opportunity to lead their institution into the future. Be bold, do it, and socialize the why.
Andrea Gilbert: People get nervous about change because we keep adding things without asking what we stop doing. What do we reallocate funds from to take a risk and try something new? AI is scary for many. How do you build confidence to change behavior?
Dave Hunt (36:46): We have tools now to react quickly. With stealth apps, or FAFSA students who weren’t on our radar until they submit, we can respond faster. We can craft campaigns quickly, use AI to accelerate production, and get students the information they need for decisions.
As competition rises and student populations shrink, the institutions who excel will find different ways to react to what’s in front of them. AI gives us ability to implement quickly when opportunities show up.
What they’re watching next (39:50)
Rhea Vitalis: Closing question. What are you watching most closely over the next 6–12 months?
Dave Hunt (40:18): KU is leaning into competency-based education with Jay Hawk flex. It recognizes students want different educational experiences. Competency-based means you work at your pace and demonstrate mastery.
I’m fascinated to see how students gravitate to it, what their experience is, and what it tells us about how we need to evolve education. I suspect the answer is yes, and I’m curious if we need to build toward that now rather than react later.
Andrea Gilbert (43:40): So in my 25 plus years in higher ed, there's never a thing that lets me sleep well at night because it is ever changing. But we have come so far. We know that AI's growing role in the personalization process of the student journey is the next major shift.
We have been talking a lot about being visible and getting that content out there, but visibility, is going to give way to relevance. Making the student interaction really feel one-to-one. It ties directly to what you're talking about in that modality, continuing to shift in that experience. It’s what students are looking for in their higher ed experience.
For our partnership with KU and Everspring, that means that we're continuing to blend our data and our storytelling and the empathy on how we best optimize how AI is interpreting and services that content to the students. But in general, for others listening, the goal is to create a digital experience that feels deeply human, even as they're increasingly mediated by different intelligence systems.