Lincoln Laboratory engineers, 
admissions officers, and Ivy League counselors. Proud partner of 
Here is the part of the AI conversation that gets flipped: while everyone worries about students using AI, colleges are quietly using it too, on the other side of the desk. In a 2023 survey by Intelligent, about half of admissions offices said they already used AI in their review, and 80 percent expected to by 2024. So yes, there is a real chance software touches your application before a person does. Let me explain what that actually means.
I’m Nico. I’ve coached over 200 students into nearly every top 100 school in the country. Here is the honest picture from the admissions side.
What colleges actually use AI for
Not to make the final decision. Mostly to handle volume and speed up the early, mechanical parts of reading tens of thousands of applications:
- Sorting and summarizing transcripts and recommendation letters, the most-cited uses in the survey.
- First-pass reads that flag or organize applications for the human readers who follow.
- Screening for AI-written essays, ironically, some offices use AI to help catch AI.
What still comes down to a human
The decision. Admissions officers are clear that AI handles the grunt work, but people make the call, because the things that actually get you in, nuance, voice, a story that lands, are exactly what software cannot judge. Two-thirds of the offices in that survey also said they were worried about the ethics of using AI at all, which is why almost none of them hand it the final say.
What this means for how you apply
- Write for a human, because a human decides. Do not try to game a machine reader. The essay still has to move a person.
- Be clear and well-organized. If an early pass is automated, clean structure and specifics help you regardless of who, or what, reads first.
- Your essay still has to sound like you. A generic, machine-flat essay reads poorly to both an AI screen and a human reader. Authenticity wins on both.
The takeaway is not to be paranoid that a robot is judging you. It is that the whole system, on both sides, rewards the same thing: a real, specific, human application.
Where AdmissionsOS fits
Sol, the AI college counselor inside AdmissionsOS, is built around that reality. It helps you produce an application that reads clearly and, above all, sounds unmistakably like you, the thing that survives an automated first pass and wins the human read that decides your outcome. You use AI on your side the same smart way they use it on theirs.
Want an application built to win the human read? Start with AdmissionsOS.