Real-time identity validation & access control

AI Instructor Validation

An AI-assisted access portal that verifies academic instructors against official university sources, routes uncertain cases for human approval, and returns a clear decision in one guided flow.

Business problem

The challenge

Instructor access requests were a high-volume operational bottleneck. Teams had to confirm that an applicant belonged to a legitimate institution and department before granting access, turning a simple account request into repetitive research and follow-up.

The workflow needed to move quickly without letting AI make an opaque access-control decision. Strong matches could be approved automatically, but incomplete or conflicting evidence needed a safe path to manual review.

Technical solution

Our approach

The architecture separates evidence gathering, AI interpretation, and policy-based routing so each decision remains explainable and uncertain cases stay under human control.

  1. 01

    Capture verified inputs

    A focused account flow collects the instructor’s name, .edu email, institution, and department, with required-field, domain, and input validation before any external work begins.

  2. 02

    Ground the decision

    The backend searches public faculty information and asks OpenAI to evaluate name, institution, department, and email alignment. Validation is constrained to official school sources and returned as structured confidence and reasoning.

  3. 03

    Route by confidence

    High-confidence matches are activated automatically. Missing university or department evidence is denied, while ambiguous matches remain pending and are routed to a department head for approval.

  4. 04

    Close the operational loop

    The system persists every request, records status changes in an audit log, sends outcome notifications, and gives internal teams search, filtering, reporting, and manual override controls.

Results & impact

Faster access without giving up control.

The finished system automates the common path, preserves a human decision point for ambiguity, and gives every applicant a clear outcome.

85%

less validation time

Automated research and decision routing remove most of the repetitive work from instructor access reviews.

≈5,000

hours saved per year

The production workflow turns a recurring manual process into a scalable, real-time service.

3

confidence-based paths

Requests resolve to automated approval, manual review, or denial based on grounded evidence and explicit thresholds.

Visual assets

One request, three transparent states.

Tech stack

Built for production.

Built as a unified full-stack application spanning the applicant experience, validation API, AI-assisted research, confidence-based decision logic, approval routing, email notifications, persistence, audit logging, and internal operations tooling.

React 19TypeScriptNode.jsExpressOpenAI APIPerplexity AI SDKPostgreSQLPrismaSendGridTailwind CSSJestReplit