Syracuse students plan their fall schedules — increasingly with help from Clementine, the University's AI class-search assistant.
This spring, Syracuse University introduced Clementine Class Search — an AI assistant, built on Claude, that lets students explore course opportunities by simply asking. Instead of clicking through the class search and cross-referencing the course catalog, a student can type a question the way they'd say it out loud — "what writing classes are available on Tuesdays after 2?" — and get an answer in seconds.
Then registration season arrived, and students showed up in force.
A registration-season debut
In its first 37 days — March 25 to April 30, 2026 — 2,038 students asked Clementine 8,217 questions across 2,401 conversations. That included 1,956 Syracuse students and 82 from SUNY ESF. This was no quiet pilot: from day one, Clementine became a real point of contact for the Fall 2026 registration window.
Right when students needed it most
The busiest days weren't random — they landed exactly on the published registration appointment days. On April 14, when junior and sophomore/first-year appointments overlapped, students sent Clementine 1,055 questions across 313 conversations — its single busiest day. The five-day undergraduate registration window (April 9-15) alone drove 41% of all the questions in the entire 37-day period.
And Clementine didn't keep office hours. More than a third of all usage (37%) happened outside weekday business hours — late nights and weekends, exactly when advising offices are closed but students are staring at their draft schedules. When a question hit at 1 a.m. the night before an appointment, Clementine was there to help.
Students asked in their own words
What made Clementine click was that students didn't have to learn a system — they just described what they wanted, in their own words, often in a single run-on sentence:
"what 3 credit art classes or classes about fashion can I take as an elective as a sociology major that are on monday wednesdays at 2:15 fall 2026"
Others kept it short and specific:
- "no 8am and nothing past 5pm, and no fridays"
- "recommend an entry level elective with creative writing"
- "Build a 14 credit schedule, avoiding Fridays"
- "classes that align with someone who wants to go to law school"
These weren't one-and-done lookups. Two-thirds of conversations went beyond a single question, and the longest ran 56 back-and-forth turns as a student worked through an entire schedule. Many students came back days later to keep refining — treating Clementine like a planning partner, not a search box.
Handling the rush, so advisors can focus
During the most intense registration weeks of the year, Clementine fielded thousands of routine catalog and scheduling questions — many of them after hours — that would otherwise have landed on advisors, departments and the Registrar's office. It handled that surge efficiently and around the clock, at a small fraction of the cost of the staff time it would have taken, freeing Syracuse's advising staff to spend their time on the complex, high-stakes conversations where a human's expertise matters most. Clementine isn't a replacement for an advisor; it's a way to make sure every student can get a fast answer to a simple question, whenever they need one.
What's next
The clearest signal in Clementine's first season was what students wanted more of. Again and again they asked questions that connect a course to their own degree path — "what's required for my major," "does this count toward my requirement," "what should I take next." Today Clementine knows the full course catalog; the next step is making it student-aware by connecting it to each student's degree audit, so it can answer those personal questions directly.
That's the road ahead — and it's a road students have already told us they want to walk. Clementine's first registration season showed that when AI meets students where they are, in their own language and on their own schedule, they'll reach for it.