Do you use AI tools in the process? How do you keep student voice authentic?
AI can be genuinely interesting and wildly unreliable, sometimes in the same sentence. The honest answer is that it’s a powerful tool with real limitations, and the firms pretending it doesn’t exist are just as misguided as the ones quietly using it to do the actual work.
Our position: if a specific use of AI adds more value to our ability to help a student, we would be fools not to leverage that opportunity. Why wouldn’t you want every possible advantage for your clients? For research, for stress-testing angles, for exploring how a particular school might read a particular framing — if it makes us sharper, we will use whatever tool is effective. AI, a red pen, a whiteboard, a three-hour phone call, a dog-eared copy of a school’s published class profile — we don’t romanticize the instrument, we care about the result.
Where we draw a hard line is the writing itself, and not for the reason you might think. Sure, AI can write convincingly. It can probably mimic your child’s voice with enough samples. But the process of figuring out what to say — wrestling with the story, discovering what actually matters to you, learning to translate your own thinking into clear, persuasive prose — that has profound carryover effects that go far beyond one application. That skill serves our clients for a lifetime: in interviews, in professional writing, in how they advocate for themselves. Shortcutting it with a generated draft doesn’t just risk detection, it robs the student of something genuinely valuable. Our consultants aren’t here for the paycheck. They’re here because they love coaching. And you don’t shortchange the thing you love.
