Australian AI platform for educators drives global impact following launch on Microsoft’s global marketplace

An AI-driven platform developed at The University of Sydney is enhancing tertiary education outcomes globally and boost Australia's innovation exports following its January 2026 launch on Microsoft Marketplace.

The platform, Cogniti, enables educators to build course-specific AI agents that act as subject tutors. These agents provide personalised feedback on student work, simulating scenarios and guiding students through complex problem-solving steps. Each agent is designed by the relevant educator, aligned with their teaching methods and trained on course materials.

"We hear a lot about the importance of giving educators the ability to be in the driver's seat," says Professor Danny Liu, the platform's architect. "We're giving them a tool where they can control how AI can be used effectively, because they're the experts in their curriculum and teaching practices."

Delivering more accessible and practical education experiences

Early trials of Cogniti have delivered new and effective teaching approaches. For example, nursing educators from three New Zealand polytechnics (Unitec, Manukau Institute of Technology and Toi Ohomai Institute of Technology) have collaborated to develop three agents that simulate clinical scenarios that students often find challenging, complementing face-to-face teaching.

One agent helps students master drug calculations under pressure, while another simulates a deteriorating patient whose condition worsens unless the student nurse correctly diagnoses the problem and requests appropriate intervention. The third helps students de-escalate tense situations with distressed patients.

At Unitec, 100 per cent of surveyed students said they would recommend the deteriorating patient agent, with 92 per cent agreeing it helped their studies. Across all three nursing agents, students at Unitec and Manukau logged 820 conversations in the second semester of 2025 alone, and provided consistently positive feedback.

"We had a student who was very nervous about coming into the maths-heavy part of their study," says Dr James Oldfield, Manager of Digital Learning at Unitec. "They really took to working with the agent, spent quite a bit of time with it, and essentially aced the test. They came back to the teacher with very positive, unsolicited feedback."

Toi Ohomai student Shannon Harema also reports that the platform has made a real difference. "I think Cogniti became really helpful to me in my second nursing exam because there were topics in semester two that took me longer to understand or retain information for," they say. "Cogniti simplified everything for me and was able to lay it all out in an easy-to-grasp table."

At the same time, Toi Ohomai is rolling out AI agents in other disciplines, and it's telling that most interactions are occurring outside standard business hours. Automotive students across its regional campuses now have access to a 24/7 AI study agent, and the institution has developed a writing assistance tool that helps students build academic writing skills while keeping all student data in-house.

"Students are juggling many competing demands," says Jonathan Adams, Education Technology Advisor at Toi Ohomai. "Having these sorts of tools available around the clock means students can get help exactly when they need it, and that additional student support is meaningful."

Accelerating student development to improve career prospects

Cogniti is also being used in other innovative ways. At Auckland University of Technology, Senior Lecturer Sarah Wymer created 'Jack', an AI mentor modelled on the Auckland Football Club's marketing manager. First-year sports marketing students use Jack to refine sponsorship proposals, where the agent prompts deeper thinking about audience, creativity and commercial value without giving direct answers.

"One student mentioned that interacting with the agent felt like talking to someone who actually works in the industry," says Wymer. "That was interesting, because Jack was designed to mirror how a club-side marketing manager would challenge ideas, asking the kinds of questions students don't always expect in class.

"What stood out was how engaged they became. Students were staying after class to refine their ideas. They don't usually take many notes, but suddenly they had pages of them capturing the prompts and feedback Jack was giving."

The quality of student work produced using Jack reflects this shift. Wymer says several students began developing marketing proposals with more advanced thinking around sponsor integration, audience value and incentive design. This is the kind of commercial reasoning she would normally expect to see later in a degree, or after direct exposure to industry settings.

Leiden University in the Netherlands has deployed Cogniti across four faculties, reaching 2,000 students, with plans to expand across three more in short order. Applications range from basic subject tutoring to complex role-playing scenarios. For example, Psychology Master's degree students can practice suicidal risk assessment through conversations with a simulated severely depressed patient, while pharmacy students can prepare for challenging interactions with an older customer whose medication isn't ready.

"Role-playing allows us to bridge that gap between learning from a book and putting knowledge into practice," says Julian van der Kraats, Product Owner for AI and Automation at Leiden University. "You can't just take students and throw them into certain situations - it's too risky. These scenarios prepare them for interactions that are otherwise difficult to stage authentically."

Securing sensitive data to provide the freedom to learn

A common thread emerges from these examples: Cogniti's privacy and security infrastructure enables forms of experimentation that public AI tools currently cannot. For example, students and educators need to trust that conversations remain confidential, data isn't used for commercial training and institutions retain control over their educational content.

Built on Microsoft Azure, Cogniti addresses these concerns by keeping student data within institutional control. The platform allows educators to analyse anonymised conversation patterns to improve their agents while giving universities the opportunity to develop AI applications that align with their values and regulatory requirements.

"Security is always my primary selling point - any tool we use must be safe. However, added to that is Cogniti's functionality that makes it easy for educators to get started and allows them to learn from their own data," says van der Kraats. "There are many experiments where educational institutions take out subscriptions with large GenAI providers, but then the data is over there, and you cannot learn as easily from it."

With Cogniti now available on Microsoft Marketplace, universities worldwide have the opportunity to adopt and customise it for their own contexts. For institutions navigating the responsible use of AI, the tool provides a clear path forward - preserving educator expertise while expanding what's possible in the classroom.

"We're at a point where this technology could really benefit education if used well and in a considered way," says Oldfield. "It's not a quick fix. The important thing is making sure we're designing these agents in a way that enhances learning for the student and doesn't do the learning for them."