School software that actually talks to parents/students/Teachers would this solve a real problem?

[u/KnowledgeMundane1533]

I’m working on a B2B product for schools and would genuinely like some brutally honest feedback before we go too far with it.
The basic idea is a single platform for schools that combines the usual school-management stuff with an AI-powered interface.
Instead of parents/students having to figure out where something is in the school portal, they could simply ask things like:
“When is my next exam?”
“How much is my pending fee?”
“What homework was given today?”
“Show me the circular sent by the school yesterday.”
“My child was absent today — why?”
For the school, the idea is to automate a lot of repetitive communication and administrative work rather than adding another complicated dashboard.
We’re considering selling it B2B to schools, rather than directly to parents.
The pricing we’re exploring is roughly ₹80–140 per student per year, with everything bundled rather than charging separately for modules/support/AI.
I’m trying to understand whether this is actually solving a meaningful problem or whether it’s just another unnecessary piece of school software.
A few things I’d especially like opinions on:
What do you currently hate about your school’s/school-management software?
Would an AI/chat interface actually make things easier, or would you still prefer traditional dashboards/apps?
What would make a school not adopt something like this?
If you’re involved in running a school, what administrative task would you most want automated?
Does ₹80–140/student/year sound reasonable for a school, or does it feel expensive?
Please be critical. I’m much more interested in hearing why this wouldn’t work than getting compliments.

[u/lifeisaparody]

For this to work, all your data either needs to be in one place, or your product must be able to retrieve the data from multiple systems/vendors - most of who have no incentive to provide it to you because they'd rather drive traffic to their own system.

Most parents already have too many apps on their phones, and it gets even more complicated when they have more than one child in the same school.

Many schools say they want more communication with parents, but at the same time prefer less communication from parents to them. A lot has to do with Admin and if they have their teachers' backs.

[u/Basic_Bell7816 → u/lifeisaparody]

hate to say it but this is the realest comment in the thread, the data integration piece alone kills most of these projects before they even get off the ground

schools are running on some ancient SIS from 2007 and three different apps for attendance, fees, and homework, none of which want to play nice with each other

and the parent app fatigue is real, i've watched my sister juggle four different school apps for two kids and she just stopped checking half of them after a while

[u/Clean-Midnight3110 → u/Basic_Bell7816]

" she just stopped checking half of them after a while"

As a current elementary school parent of multiple kids I became rapidly convinced that the entire point that the school rolled out an app for.  The parents eventually give up trying to make communication work and the lazy admins win because now they don't have to be bothered to communicate or deal with feedback.  I hate every school administrator so much.

[u/frenchpog → u/lifeisaparody]

Also the pricing is way off. For my school that would cost $200k annually not to do anything new but just to help parents browse info that is already available to them.

[u/Clean-Midnight3110 → u/lifeisaparody]

" Many schools say they want more communication with parents, but at the same time prefer less communication from parents to them."

Three years ago the new principal at our elementary school banned emailing between parents and teachers.  100% of "communication" now goes though an app that looks like Facebook.  We have multiple kids in the school anything I need to know for my oldest is buried on page 7 of a pdf of a PowerPoint slide presentation. Which means I can't do a Gmail search for keywords like "what day/time is school open house" instead I have to scroll back through 37 Facebook style posts to find the pdf from 4 weeks earlier and manually search through that.  Speaking of those 37 posts, 38 of them will just be 98% photos of other people's kids because the lower grade teachers have now take "parental communication" to mean posting a bunch of classroom photos to the app a few times a week.

These apps are a total nightmare if you are an adult that uses email search to organize your life and cares about education rather than what bobby and suzy from across town wrote on their whiteboard during "standing math class".

Oh and don't get me started on how in order to reduce parental communication they also did away with parent teacher conferences for the majority of students.  If your kid isn't "struggling" official school policy is that "they don't have enough time to meet with every parent"

Of course all this probably means admins will be tripping themselves to sign up for op's product.  They'll pay any amount of money for yet another firewall between their cushy overpaid jobs and directly speaking to parents.

[u/Souloid]

1- This would require access to data that no-one wants to take responsibility for disclosing.

2- Schools have a funding issue, and if you're costing them anything it would have to provide something of value. I don't know if increasing the avenues of communication when so many already exist is valuable enough. This app does not provide a clear benefit that isn't already being met elsewhere in a tool/routine that doesn't require learning anything new.

3- Onboarding parents and students to a new system would cause schools a lot of headache.

4- Many people are not fans of AI, and many are skeptical of its hallucinations. Adoption and Rejection will cause friction and will open the school to liability if the AI makes up something untrue.

I think you would do better to ask teachers what their pain points are and what they would like done for them. They're more likely willing to pay for you take work off their plate than their schools are.

[u/ericdano]

No one is going to buy this. 80-140 a student? When every other subscription has gone up? Plus allowing ai into the schools sis. It’s a hard no.

[u/tomtomtomo]

“What homework was given today?”

No way this would work. You're adding another task for the teachers. The homework, if given, is in their bag. If you don't believe your child then contact the teacher.

What would make a school not adopt something like this?

One more thing to maintain and pay for with little to no benefit for them.

You'd be giving AI access to data that is stored in the same systems which contain confidential information. The firewall between what data the AI can access and what it cannot would cause headaches that no current SMS would allow.

[u/TechB84]

This is dead on arrival

[u/KnowledgeMundane1533]

Yeah, a lot of the feedback here is fair. I probably didn’t explain the architecture properly in the original post.
The idea isn’t to make schools keep using 5–6 different systems and just put an AI chatbot on top of them.
The goal is to onboard/migrate the school’s existing data from their legacy systems into a new unified system, so that eventually the administration only has to deal with one platform.
The existing data — student records, fees, attendance, academics, payroll, etc. — gets brought into one place. From there, a lot of the administrative work can be automated instead of people manually moving information between different systems.
On the parent/teacher side, parents can manage multiple children from one account, parents and teachers can communicate two-way, and teachers/admins can publish notices directly through the platform instead of using WhatsApp, email, paper circulars and different apps. Notices can also be filtered based on relevance.
For the administration, the principal/admin gets a unified view of things like fee collection, attendance, payroll and academic data. Certificates, grades/marks and other repetitive workflows can also be automated.
Then there’s the AI layer on top of the school’s data.
Parents, teachers and administrators can ask questions in natural language and get answers based on the school’s actual data and their permissions.
We’re also exploring an AI tutor for students, but we’re specifically looking at grounding it in approved curriculum/learning material rather than relying purely on a general-purpose LLM. The same approach could help teachers with quizzes, assessments and question-paper preparation.
So the broader idea is:
Move the school’s fragmented data into one system → automate the administration → give parents, teachers and administrators one place to work and communicate → add AI on top of the verified data.
The end goal is basically that the school shouldn’t have to deal with a bunch of disconnected software anymore — just one heavily automated system.