What If Every Student Had 24/7 Support. Developing a Digital Workforce with Ruben Harris & Timur Meyster

AI in higher education is everywhere right now, but most of what schools hear is theory, hype, or another vendor promise. We wanted something more concrete, so I sat down with Ruben Harris and Timur Meyster, co-founders of Outrival (and previously Career Karma), to talk about what it looks like to deploy a real “digital workforce” that supports students at scale without pushing humans out of the loop.

We get specific about outbound AI agents that call and text proactively across the student lifecycle, from enrollment to retention and re-enrollment. Ruben and Timur share why they avoid one-size-fits-all bots and instead give each digital worker a clear job description tied to measurable goals like meaningful conversations, contact rates, persistence, and ROI. We also dig into practical use cases colleges can start with quickly, including reaching out to stop-outs, following up with prospective students who went quiet, and helping learners navigate complex steps like financial aid and missing documents, all while integrating with systems like Slate and Salesforce.

Then we talk about what leaders actually need to manage this well: student feedback via text surveys, dashboards that surface patterns across thousands of conversations, and a real supervision model that includes training, objection handling, tone and voice tuning, and ongoing compliance considerations like FERPA and responsible outreach. We also preview Ruben and Timur’s new series, The New Normal, focused on institutions using AI in production at scale.

Subscribe, share this episode with a colleague, and leave a review if it helped you think more clearly about AI strategy that actually shows results.

https://www.outrival.com/

https://www.outrival.com/blog/the-new-normal

eloy@4leggedmedia.com

Transcript

Welcome And Why Digital Workforce

0:10

Hi, I'm Eloy Ortiz Oakley, and this is another episode of the "Rant" podcast. Welcome. This is the podcast where we pull back the curtain and break down the people, the policies, and the politics of our higher education system. In this episode, I get to sit down with two entrepreneurs, two guys who have been working in the higher education landscape for many, many years, starting off as the co-founders of Career Karma. Many of you may have run into them at Career Karma, and now as the co-founders of Outrival. And I'm talking about Ruben Harris and Timur Meyster. Ruben and Timor, as I said, are co-founders of Outrival, a company that's building digital workforce solutions for colleges and universities throughout the country. And what do we mean by that? Digital workforce. I know we've talked a lot about AI on this podcast, as well as other agentic solutions and how these solutions are helping more and more colleges and universities be more precise with their learners, create a more personal experience for them. But Timor and Ruben are creating digital workforce solutions, and they'll explain it much better than I can. These solutions aren't meant to displace the human in the loop, because as we all know, whether on this podcast or other experiences, that the human is central to the student experience. But their solutions, their digital workforce solutions, help expand the opportunity for the humans to reach more learners, to engage more learners. And so they'll talk about their agentic technology and how they deploy it, how they're learning, how they're helping more colleges, universities engage more learners So I'll let Ruben and Timor explain more about their technology and the kinds of use cases that they're deploying, and how they're keeping the human at the center of the engagement with the learner. One other thing that they're doing that I wanna make sure you all are aware of is they are producing a new podcast video series that I think you all will enjoy. It features many of the same guests that have been here on The Rant podcast, people like Scott Pulsipher from Western Governors University or Greg Fowler from the University of Maryland Global Campus, talking about how they are deploying on-the-ground innovative solutions using AI to drive more engagement. Ruben and Timor have titled their new video series, podcast series, The New Normal, and I think that's a great title because this is the new normal. Deploying AI and other agentic solutions, I think, is going to be key to developing the new normal when we're talking about engaging learners and what they expect in return. So their video series called "The New Normal" kicked off on June 25th, so make sure and check it out. I will put a link to their website in the notes section of this podcast, so check it out. And with that backdrop, please enjoy my conversation with Ruben Harris and Timur Meyster, co-founders of Arrival

Meet Outrival And The Mission

eloy-ortiz-oakley_2_05-29-2026_100843 3:28

Ruben and Timor, welcome to the Rant podcast

ruben-harris_1_05-29-2026_130843 3:32

Thank you, Eloy. We appreciate you

timur-meyster-_1_05-29-2026_130843 3:33

Yeah. It's our pleasure

eloy-ortiz-oakley_2_05-29-2026_100843 3:36

It's great to have you both. It's great to have some leaders in AI on the podcast. We talk a lot about AI on this podcast with CIOs, CTOs, university and college leaders, but it's great to have a couple of individuals who are doing this work on the ground, helping colleges and universities leverage AI. So we'll jump into all of that along the way, but first let me start by, by asking you two how are things going at Outrival? You guys are co-founders of Outrival. You've been at this for quite some time. You've been in higher ed for quite some time. How are things going at Outrival, and describe your mission

ruben-harris_1_05-29-2026_130843 4:15

Yeah, things are going really well at Outrival. I'll be brief on my side and let Timur follow up, but essentially we're building these outbound AI agents for the education industry and other organizations that have a lot of people essentially serving people throughout their student journey or their customer journey. We're currently at about 3 million calls a month targeting about 10 million calls a month by the end of this summer, and many more text, emails, and voicemails. And it's all about proactively supporting students and anticipating what their needs are, not just on the enrollment side of things and the engagement side of things, but also on retention and throughout their whole student life cycle. So I'm very excited about what we've been able to do with schools across the nation offline, online, across all kinds of formats. And we are excited to tell you more on the show. Timur, anything else?

timur-meyster-_1_05-29-2026_130843 5:03

Yeah. Eloy, thanks for having us. Now I'll just add that I've known this guy for now close to 15 years. We first started Career Karma 'cause we were on a mission to help adults upscale, pivot their careers figure out how they can get to that o- opportunity in terms of their careers. And we funny enough, ended up building a large proactive call center team that would reach out to people looking for guidance if they're leav- leaving the military and they wanna maybe pursue cybersecurity. Do they go back to college, boot camps online courses? What's interesting now with Outrival is we get to both combine kinda our passion for serving the student and also we have a very deep perspective on how do we help institutions that are also looking to leverage technology, AI is one of those technologies, to help their advisors, help students, and so on. So very excited to share our learning so far. We're still in an early inning and this is just a very exciting time to be builders.

eloy-ortiz-oakley_2_05-29-2026_100843 6:05

Oh, absolutely. So let me ask you this Timor. How did your journey... you began your journey, as you mentioned, with Career Karma and the work that you all were doing there, and I think that's where I first met you guys. How has that journey informed where you are today with Outrival?

timur-meyster-_1_05-29-2026_130843 6:23

It

Career Karma Lessons From Real Calls

timur-meyster-_1_05-29-2026_130843 6:24

started with Ruben and I first doing thousands of calls with prospective students and students ourselves to understand what's holding someone back what is their plan in terms of picking a school, what's important to them how does an ad- an advisor or a coach guide someone? And those learnings helped us now design experiences that are digital, and you can see the folks behind me, they're actually-- that's not a virtual background. It's our team. And our team helps to take repetitive work, we call it digi- repetitive work that becomes digital work. Things like proactively reaching out to someone to remind about something, they're missing a transcript. How do we get that student who's going through the admissions process for the first time, how do we get them kinda to understand what are all the requirements, right? So they don't fall through the cracks and actually make it to the outcome, which is picking a school and enrolling. And so we've been able to leverage a lot of that expertise as well as tailoring it to our customer's enrollment process or re-enrollment process or other types of questions that students have. And students have thousands of different questions, depending if they're already enrolled or not, and we've been very successful in terms of driving impact. Ruben said, we're making over three million calls per month In terms of driving impact, but also creating ROI. For a lot of our institutions, ROI is someone is able to retain for longer, they're able to graduate, or they're able to take people who already are expressing interest and enroll. So excited to go deeper, but that's the experience that led us to now be very familiar with the student journey as we build out Rylo.

ruben-harris_1_05-29-2026_130843 8:05

The only thing that I'll add is another piece that we learned from Career Karma is that making decisions are often more emotional versus rational. So when you're choosing between schools, you're not just comparing what they offer versus the other. There's like a lot of things from a emotional perspective, from a parent's perspective. There's a motivation perspective. Maybe you're the first person that went to college, so how do you figure out what's the balance between get- moving someone through an enrollment funnel and also motivating them and encouraging them by connecting them to the right human? So as we go through this conversation, we're gonna share how we thought through not just being on the phones, but the balance between digital workers, humans, motivation, psychology, and decision-making.

Selling AI As A Digital Worker

eloy-ortiz-oakley_2_05-29-2026_100843 8:55

Let me pull on that thread a little bit, Ruben, with you. W- when you're talking to college and university leaders how do you talk about the relationship between the support that you're providing them the technology that you're providing them, and their own workforce? H- how does that conversation go? And for somebody listening in, what advice do you have for them on actually articulating the value of leveraging the kind of technology that you bring?

ruben-harris_1_05-29-2026_130843 9:27

Yeah. So you probably noticed that I use different language than other people use. That's part of the human side of things, where instead of calling them AI agents, we call them digital workers. So the first thing that we do is say, "Hey, imagine that your staff, whether it's an admission staff or a student success team, got promoted and it has people working for them." You understand that. That's great. Imagine if you brought on a digital worker or a human to work with you. What would you do? You would give it a job description. You would set an objective, let's say it's for an internship. If that human or that digital worker accomplishes that objective, then you will consider bringing them on as a full-time member of your team. People go to college, people in college do internships. It helps them understand what's going on. But you, if you're going to create budget for a human or for a digital worker, you should probably assign it towards something that's going to add value towards your organization. And right now, a lot of the leaders that we're speaking with are saying, "Hey, I know I have to do something with AI this year." So they're announcing they're gonna do something with AI. But a lot of times the things that they're trying aren't always leading to something that you can measure. And there are things that you can measure when it comes to enrollments or transfer rates or contact rates, and you can actually prove things out in a short period of time. And the challenge for a lot of higher ed leaders that we see is they think in annual cycles or multi-year decade cycles for changes, but you can't move that slow in an AI driven world. But you are used to the internship model, which is a shorter time span. So if you apply these digital workers to specific objectives in a short period of time, you can prove things that move the needle and decide what you do want to invest in annually, multi-year, or on a decade long cycle

eloy-ortiz-oakley_2_05-29-2026_100843 11:22

Right. Timor, let me ask you so you're designing and building this digital workforce for your different partner colleges and universities. I imagine they all have different ways, different use cases that they wanna deploy this. What are some of those examples of use cases that you see happening in the field or that you think are prime targets for the kind of solution that you're providing?

timur-meyster-_1_05-29-2026_130843 11:45

I'll

Use Cases That Move Retention

timur-meyster-_1_05-29-2026_130843 11:46

share kind of three things we'll usually advise our customers on. I think the first one is how do we increase the amount of meaningful conversations that their staff is having, right? I think it also goes back to your earlier question in terms of how does AI work alongside their staff? The, a great metric for that is let's in- increase the number of meaningful conversations there. The second point that we'll discuss with them is what is the objective? If everything goes as you want, is someone retaining for longer, or are they enrolling, or are they navigating complexity of maybe filling out FAFSA and all the financial requirements, right? What are we actually trying to do in terms of the progression? And the third one, it comes down to the use cases that we've seen work that that are that, that are easy in complexity to execute, to build support internally that this is actually working. And so just to give you a few examples of those for some universities, it's about having AI reach out to your stop-outs, right? And when an AI reaches out to the stop-outs it's an easy one to kinda get everyone aligned around, 'cause a lot of the time they-- the person who stopped out might have gotten some emails or calls initially, but six months later, it's unlikely someone proactively checking in with them to say "Would you like to come back? Can I point you to more resources?" And so this example is perfect for one of our digital workers to take on, 'cause if someone does answer and say, "You know what? My my family had a medical issue, so I stopped out. Now I'm ready to return," the AI could say I can schedule you with your advisor, Hannah Miller." So the digital worker does know who their advisor was, they know what the school's policy is on re-enrolling, and then it could either schedule them, it could send them a link, or it could guide them. And so that's one of the best examples to start, since they're not doing the work that kinda the staff is doing, and they're increasing the number of meaningful conversation those advisors are having to drive retention on the enrollment side. Sometimes it's about reaching out to people that were actively speaking to their human advisors, and then they just went dark, right? The digital worker could reach out to them and say, "Again, I'm reaching out to you on behalf of your advisor." The magic with these kinda digital beings is that they're all connected to your CRM, whether you use Slate or Salesforce or an SAS system, and then it's able to reference what course they were studying w- what point or what document they're missing for them to proceed, and then it always gives them an option, "Do you want me to connect you to the human Or do you want me to send you a link?" And it's about creating that optionality for them. So I would say those are some of the powerful use cases in terms of adding versus replacing.

Measuring Student Experience And Impact

eloy-ortiz-oakley_2_05-29-2026_100843 14:51

So you're adding capacity to the human. You're helping them reach more learners, do more on any given day. H- how do you m- measure the success of the interaction with the person on the other end, the learner, the student? Do you-- Is there a way to survey those students? Is there a way to learn whether or not that interaction is actually successful? H- how do you do that part?

timur-meyster-_1_05-29-2026_130843 15:13

Yeah. S- so we, so our team developed th- there's a few ways we gather that feedback. One way is literally following up with someone after a conversation through text message and say, "Hey, I know you spoke to like the digital assistant. How did, how would you rate this experience on a scale from one to five?" And someone could respond over text, right? So you're not sending someone an email with a survey, and then people ignore that email, and no one actually does the survey.

eloy-ortiz-oakley_2_05-29-2026_100843 15:41

I do that all the

timur-meyster-_1_05-29-2026_130843 15:42

kinda it's kinda like the restaurant reservation one for when you're, if you're gonna attend, two if you wanna cancel. We have a similar system that's able to have a natural language conversation with the student, and then we're able to take their responses and structure in a way where on a dashboard or a report, a leader who is deploying AI could actually see, are people enjoying and finding it helpful. So that's one of the, one of the very like easy ways to gather that. Another way we do this is we create a word cloud for the leadership team around tens of thousands of conversations that are happening, and a human or advisor like manager cannot possibly absorb tens of thousands of conversations, concerns, objections. We're able to show it to them, and then they can click on each term or each reason and actually hear conversations between students and the AI to be able to further understand what's actually happening. So now we're actually leveraging this technology in a way that gives way more insights, it's way more impactful, and it also builds this notion of like we're only doing things that are adding to the experience of the students versus doing things that dilute the meaningfulness of having an advisor or having someone kinda enroll into your program

eloy-ortiz-oakley_2_05-29-2026_100843 17:06

And do you use that feedback to help the digital worker get better? How do you improve the interaction over time?

Training And Managing Digital Workers

timur-meyster-_1_05-29-2026_130843 17:15

It's-- So we it's a great question. So a lot of the time we'll first ask, like, how would a human... If this was a human workforce, right? If you just hired someone brand new to be on this team, what happens today, right? And the reality is that usually there's a handbook or an onboarding document that someone has to go through. They do mock sessions, they listen to calls to observe, like, how are these conversations sounding, and then their manager actually reviews conversations to give them feedback. So we've been able to productize and even have we created a new role called the digital worker manager. It's a human on our team that manages the worker, and then they train the school on how do you tweak maybe the way the agent sounds? How do you tweak their voice? You can make some voices could be more cheery, some voices could be more direct. How do you kinda tweak the objection handling even, right? Some students are saying, "Hey I'm busy right now." What's the best way to respond to an objection like that, right? Should it be, "I can send you a link so you can find a time," or you could say, "Hey, I'm gonna call you back"? So those are some of the things that we then train our our counterparts and then the school is able to use our platform to be able to be kinda self-sufficient and manage the digital workforce like they do with their human staff and create that co-intelligence that kinda works alongside the existing advisors.

Standing Out In A Crowded AI Market

eloy-ortiz-oakley_2_05-29-2026_100843 18:47

Ruben y-- the three of us were recently at the ASU+GSV Summit, and, it's 8,000 people talking about AI, a whole slew of vendors talking about how their new AI solution is gonna solve all your problems. When you're talking to leaders about the work that you do at Outrival, how do you differentiate what you do versus what now every vendor says that they do?

ruben-harris_1_05-29-2026_130843 19:15

It's a great question. I would say all agents are not created equal, and I'm gonna go back to the whole human analogy, right? Managing humans is hard Managing agents is hard, and managing both of them together is even harder, right? And so it's not just about creating digital workers that can speak, that are intelligent, right? Most of the agentic solutions that our people are creating have a reactive flow. It's more of an inbound or if there's any time a problem comes up from a student, like they'll handle it or they'll resolve it. And a lot of people's approaches is creating these one-size-fits-all workers that can answer anything, that take a very long time to train and implement. When Timur and I think about setting up a digital worker, each one of them have a separate job description with a specific objective. So that's one... It's not like a one-size-fits-all. We have a proactive approach for how to set them up, but we're not just thinking about agents that are aligned with the workflow and an objective. We're thinking about performance. Timur talked to you a little bit about the dashboard and the surveys and things like that, but what-- one of the biggest challenges managing humans is knowing what they're doing all the time, whether you're in-person or remote. Some schools are in-person, some are remote. If you're a manager, maybe you're doing a one-on-one once a week, maybe twice a week at best. But can you monitor performance daily? And if you are seeing different pieces of performance daily, how are you tweaking based off of what you're seeing? How are you testing new things? So one of the schools that we talked to at ASU+GSV that's more on the more innovative side, they said they wanted to run not just 50 experiments this year, they wanted to run 500 experiments. So how are you going to run A/B tests in a call center with, let's say, a male voice versus a female voice, right? And a different time of day. That's a very simple common A/B test. You could do it with humans. You could do it with digital workers. With us, we will actually help you test 20 voices, 100 voices at a time. And actually, like you said about the learning, the digital worker can pick up and the platform can pick up what is the best performance that you're trying to achieve, and then recommend this is what we should do tomorrow or the next day. And then again, it's not just about the digital workers and being proactive and being outbound. It's how do we bridge the relationship to the humans and that, that speak to meaningful conversation? Timur said a lot of the schools back in the day when they first were thinking about call centers and speed to lead, it was all about how fast can a human get to somebody on the phone that fills out, abcuniversity.edu/apply, right? Right now, humans don't have to do that anymore. The digital worker can respond right away, say, "Hi, Eloy. This is Ruben, your digital worker. I see you spoke with Timur yesterday. How are you doing? Great. If Timur is available, cool, I could transfer you." So now my humans are talking to people that are ready Right? All day versus people that you're not sure if they're ready. That's why whole lead qualification things were a thing. So we're able to essentially differentiate ourselves that way. Most companies and platforms right now are just creating these digital workers that take a long time, and we can be live in two weeks and give you that performance and that scale. And also compliance, which is a very important thing is we can suggest the best practices of what we've seen across the board for schools. 'Cause whenever you're getting into proactive land, it's not just about technology, it's about following the rules and doing things the right way and being respectful about things, not just for your school and FERPA, but for s- for states and cities and time zones and labor laws and all of that.

eloy-ortiz-oakley_2_05-29-2026_100843 23:02

Timur you obviously come across universities as Ruben mentioned, that are way out there on the innovation side. They're very comfortable with innovation. You got the ASUs of the world, the Western Governors University of the world places like that, that are very comfortable and have a culture of innovation. So they, they're more prone to, to be thinking about different ways to apply the use cases that you just mentioned. And they have internal processes to help them manage that innovation. How do you talk to the colleges and universities that are nowhere near that kind of, of level of sophistication, but are hungry for solutions that may help them do a better job of reaching learners, do a better job of lowering the cost of education? What does that conversation look like and what advice do you give those leaders?

Making AI Work With Limited Capacity

timur-meyster-_1_05-29-2026_130843 23:56

Yeah. It's a great question. I think when we were-- It, it all comes down to, like, when we were designing and architecting Outrival's platform there was a few decisions that we made for not just this kind of visionary AI reality, but what's actually happening on the ground. The leaders that we speak with, one of their first kinda objections that they'll share is they'll tell us that, "Your AI use case sounds great, but we don't have our knowledge base up to date," right? "Your use case sounds great, but we use maybe an Oracle SAS system, and we can give you access, but our IT staff is six months backed up," right? So those are-- When we were kinda giving, given our domain expertise, when we were designing how does a digital worker join your team as an intern and could be up and running in two weeks, we needed to account for the reality of the everyday kinda admissions team or student services team that all of these pieces may not be in place. And as a result now I could share one of our customers that we're working with, like Miami Dade College, right? They're a community college that's so mission-driven that that is serving hundreds of thousands of students, right? And our expectation is not that they're just gonna take our platform and they're gonna just run with it. We, we designed, we, we collaborate, and we partner with them, like true kinda like a true extension of their team in order to make sure that we get every little piece right, right? So that's an example of just w- no matter how big or small your institution is we bring a lot of that domain expertise that ensures that our digital workers are not just 80% there. They're 100% there, and there is someone on Outrival's team that's responsible for their performance, and they're also responsible for making sure that kind of self-learning and self-improvement doesn't just happen on its own. There is a human that oversees and ensures that it complies with policies, complies with institutional requirements, and so on. So that's just a little bit of a window into how these digital workers get created, managed, and deployed.

Helping Schools Own The Platform

eloy-ortiz-oakley_2_05-29-2026_100843 26:14

And for example a college university who begins to work with you, and let's just take Miami-Dade as an example. Great college one of the, really the better colleges, community colleges in the nation. As they grow capacity and understanding of how to deploy agentic solutions, how do you change the dynamic between you and your clients as they wanna take on more responsibility? Do you have a way to, to do that as they get trained up, as they add capacity, as their IT teams become more familiar with the technology? What would that look like for a Miami-Dade over, say a five-year period?

timur-meyster-_1_05-29-2026_130843 26:51

So we look at it as a true partnership with a lot of our customers and academic partners doing the heavy lifting of sharing their strategies, their ideas, the areas that they wanna do, and then Outrival becomes another tool in their toolbox. And initially, we partner with them our institutions use Outrival just to make sure that the ROI is there. People are being helped, right? People are persisting, they're retaining, they're coming back. And once we prove out the kind of the-- we validate the core premise of using digital worker to help, then the second phase is then we roll out our platform and train their team on being able to do it in a way where they're, it, it shouldn't feel like they're driving a Formula One car, if you kn- if you like that metaphor. It should feel like they're driving your Ford SUV and you can take it on highways, you can take it on roads, you have airbags, and so on. That's kinda our vision, where in the beginning, it's all about performance, but eventually, we want our customers to be creative with how this tool could be used. And one analogy I'll make is over time institutions adopted email tools. Every institution today runs email campaigns, To thousands, if not millions of emails and reaching millions of students each day, right? So those tools in- at some point were very foreign, and it was new to the institution. However, now they've fully adopted it. They integrate with their systems and so on. And so on a five-year horizon, we feel that a digital worker is gonna be just like another tool, like email campaigns, that's gonna be much more intelligent. It will require a lot less guidance and drafting a five-paragraph email. You can just speak into kinda the platform and say, "Hey, I'm looking to reengage this segment of students," and the AI will do the heavy lifting for them. So that's our longer vision for the roadmap in terms of where this, where things will evolve to.

eloy-ortiz-oakley_2_05-29-2026_100843 29:06

That sounds great. Ruben, let me ask you this. I know you recently were telling me about an opportunity that you all are investing in to, to highlight innovation throughout the country and to put a focus on leaders in colleges and universities who are actually driving innovation, who are actually doing doing it at scale, deploying new technology solutions and really leading the country in terms of what is possible. Tell us about that effort that you guys are investing in and and tell us about where you wanna go with this I guess you would call it a video series.

ruben-harris_1_05-29-2026_130843 29:44

Yeah.

The New Normal Podcast Series

ruben-harris_1_05-29-2026_130843 29:45

Timur and I lived in San Francisco for about eight years before we moved to Miami, and we've been in Miami for the last five years. So we are big fans of all of the podcasts coming out of Silicon Valley, whether it's Dwarkesh, whether it's Acquired, whether it's Y Combinator. We did Y Combinator, we did all that. And what we learned is a lot of these shows are rightfully sharing sh- and shining light on AI vendors and the investors that are picking to invest in these AI companies that you were talking about earlier, and then sharing their philosophies and their vision about where the world is going. So similar to like your question about like differentiation, those types of podcasts are a dime a dozen and you hear them all day. What you're not hearing that much, or at all from my perspective, is people shining light on organizations that are actually using AI in production at scale in a way that's driving meaningful impact. And so Timur and I are launching a new show that's called "The New Normal," where we interview the leaders that have all-- a-actually made the decision to implement AI in production, but are also getting results. It's almost like the current shows are like people talking about shovels, And then we're interviewing the people that are like taking those shovels and like digging for gold and then sh-sharing the gold because we're in a special time where, again, going back to what I said before, I empathize with leaders. They know they have to do something with AI, similar to the internet, similar to apps with mobile, right? They know they have to do something, but they have the luxury of being able to say, "Not do anything." They say, "Hey, I'm gonna do something with AI this year." And part of the reason why they're not doing anything is they don't know how, and they don't know what their peers are doing, 'cause every time we speak with our customers, they're al-always asking us, "What are your other customers doing?" So by like hearing the stories of other leaders that are doing awesome things to improve the lives of students and employees, not only will that help other people, not only take that AI strategy and put it into production, but also s- start introducing a new model for our higher institutions that need to modernize to prepare the future leaders of the world. I'm very excited to share that show. We are about 11 episodes scheduled deep. We're gonna be dropping o-over 30 this year and many more, so stay tuned. So appreciate that.

eloy-ortiz-oakley_2_05-29-2026_100843 32:19

All right, so the podcast series is called The New Normal, and so it'll be out sometime, what, this summer?

ruben-harris_1_05-29-2026_130843 32:27

yeah, probably like June, July we'll start drop--

eloy-ortiz-oakley_2_05-29-2026_100843 32:30

All right. I'll make sure and include information about Outrival and where to find that video series, the podcast series in the notes section of this podcast so that everybody can stay tuned, and I look forward to checking it out. So thanks for doing that

ruben-harris_1_05-29-2026_130843 32:44

It won't just be video, it will be audio as

eloy-ortiz-oakley_2_05-29-2026_100843 32:47

Okay, great. So you can drop it in your, in, in your Spotify, your Apple Podcasts, or you can tune into YouTube.

ruben-harris_1_05-29-2026_130843 32:56

There you

eloy-ortiz-oakley_2_05-29-2026_100843 32:56

All right. Not that the Rant podcast needs any more competition, but we welcome it.

Five-Year Vision For Personalization

eloy-ortiz-oakley_2_05-29-2026_100843 33:02

L- listen, let me ask you both one last question as we get, begin to wrap up. And let's start with you, Ruben. Given all of the changes that are happening, you guys have been, co-founded Outrival, what, about two, two, three years ago? Somewhere in that range. So much has changed just in that small period of time. Where do you see Outrival and the technology over the next five years? Let's start with you, Ruben.

ruben-harris_1_05-29-2026_130843 33:29

Yeah. So something that Timur and I talk about a lot is something called personalization, right? And so when you're a large organization, Timur brought up Miami Dade College or any school that has tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people coming to them all the time, even if you have a staff, a human staff in the thousands, historically it's been impossible to have a relationship with that individual throughout their whole life. I think that our rival is going to be able to help organizations have a personalized relationship with all current, historical, and future people that are interested in becoming students or customers or organizations throughout their entire life cycle. And even though you have this relationship with that digital worker, which is almost like the voice of your brand, that can also text, email, and leave voicemails and take actions on your behalf, that digital worker can always connect you to the right human at the right time. Going back to the human piece, humans don't stay at organizations forever. In higher ed, some of them do. They have been there for 10, 20, 30 years, but that's not always the case. So if I'm calling my school again to get in touch with some type of person, I-- that person might not be there, so but the digital worker can always connect you with the right human at the right time. So I pray, I hope I will work every single hour that I live and breathe to actually help organizations position themselves to have that personalized relationship with anybody in their, that comes to them.

eloy-ortiz-oakley_2_05-29-2026_100843 35:06

All right. How about you, Timor? What

timur-meyster-_1_05-29-2026_130843 35:08

yeah, w- what I'll add is a little bit about Ruben and I. So we're big into kind of manifestation and having a very clear picture, not on where we are now or where we'll be in like three years, but five years from now, how do we know if we succeeded? And personally, the way I will judge my success is if I I don't know if you can see my screen, I'm pulling up my messages. My vision is that I want the college, the university, the online school to have a real relationship with the student, so that student at any time could just text the school, or if they're behind on classes or they have questions about financial aid or a hold, the AI could reach out to them and have a meaningful conversation that's engaging and someone actually feels that at any hour of the day, 24/7, they could have a meaningful conversation that knows about them, helps guide them, and that's o- once we start having our customers have persistent interactions on their, in their DMs, I would say that's how I know if we made it.

eloy-ortiz-oakley_2_05-29-2026_100843 36:17

That's great. I hope that we can get to that reality, and given the work that you two are doing, I'm sure you will help us get there. It's it's great to have you both on, on the podcast, and just thinking about how much work you've put into this ecosystem, whether at Career Karma, now at Outrival. It's just great to see two, two entrepreneurs with your backgrounds who really care about the learner engaged in this, particularly at a time right now where AI is just dominating the entire conversation. So Ruben and Timor, thank you both for your leadership, and thank you for being on the Rant podcast.

ruben-harris_1_05-29-2026_130843 36:56

Thank you for helping us

timur-meyster-_1_05-29-2026_130843 36:57

Thank you, Eloy

Closing Thoughts And Subscribe

eloy-ortiz-oakley_2_05-29-2026_100843 36:59

All right. You've been listening to my conversation with Ruben Harris and Timur Meyster, who are the co-founders of Outrival. I will make sure and put information about where to find Outrival in the notes section of this podcast. And also as soon as a link is available to the new podcast series, The New Normal, which everybody should tune into, I'll make sure and put it in the notes section as well. Thanks for watching everybody. If you're watching us on YouTube, hit subscribe, continue to follow us, and if you're listening to us on your favorite audio podcast pla- platform, hit subscribe and download this episode and share it with everybody. The team at Outrival is doing great work. So thanks for tuning in everybody, and we will see you all soon