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February 9, 2026

JET's AI Chatbot Journey

It’s hard to believe that it has only been four years since the “Public Explosion”.

In November 2022 ChatGPT was released. This conversational interface powered by GPT-3.5 made LLMs widely accessible and led to widespread adoption. Shortly after, in 2023, one of our clients asked us to implement an AI-powered chatbot for their website.

JET Education Services wanted to make their extensive research library on their website jet.org.za more accessible. They’ve always been early adopters of new technologies and committed to innovation. And our team was very keen and willing to join the exciting journey.

This is how it went.

Background

JET Education Services is an independent non-profit organization working to improve education quality in South Africa and across Africa through evidence-based research. As Africa's leading educational think-do tank, JET publishes extensive research across early childhood development, teacher development, post-school education, and ICT in education.

JET has been our client for over 15 years, and has always been enthusiastic about innovation. In fact, they were one of our first clients to make the big move from Plone Classic to Volto.

Using scriv.ai as a solution

JET approached the project from an accessibility perspective. They wanted site visitors to easily query their extensive research library rather than downloading and reading through lengthy reports. The chatbot should help users quickly find specific information across JET's extensive publications, projects, and organizational details.

Scriv.ai offered the perfect solution.

Created by Cape Town-based developer and entrepreneur Cory Zue, scriv.ai is a private chatbot platform that uses retrieval augmented generation (RAG) technology to provide answers exclusively from your own data. The platform's flexible architecture connects to websites, documents, and knowledge platforms, automatically ingesting complete sites while maintaining privacy - chats remain private to team members, and knowledge bases are never used to train external AI models.

As an added bonus, the South African connection between JET, Juizi, and scriv.ai created a natural partnership for exploring how AI could serve the education research sector. Homegrown for the win!

"It was great collaborating with Jet and Juizi and to see Scriv pushed to the limits of its capabilities. The Juizi team was a pleasure to work with and generated several useful feature ideas that made it into the product." - Cory Zue

Project goals and highlights

    • The goal was reached - it made research accessible: the AI bot enabled visitors to query jet.org.za's extensive research library through natural language rather than manual document searches

    • Highlight - custom XML integration: Juizi built a specialized XML sitemap view to enable seamless communication between Plone and scriv.ai

    • Highlight - FAQ development: JET created a dedicated FAQ page to make specific content and questions more accessible to AI

    • Highlight - reporting functionality: scriv.ai monitored question patterns and chatbot usage

    • Highlight - early adoption: JET was willing to experiment with emerging technologies - it launched when scriv.ai itself was still quite new.

Outcomes

The chatbot ran on jet.org.za from March 2024 to July 2025. Usage monitoring revealed an unexpected pattern: users primarily asked about job vacancies rather than research content.

This highlighted a few things. People are looking for work. And AI chat relies on users knowing what to ask, and needing the information that the bot has access to. Visitors unfamiliar with JET's work couldn't effectively query research they didn't know existed. The insights were valuable: they helped inform JET's subsequent website redesign, which now emphasizes structured navigation and features like dedicated vacancy listings that provide guidance rather than expecting users to know what to search for.

"It was an interesting experiment and an early realization that AI will fulfil a role and functions for diverse users." - Nathalie Vereen - COO, JET Educations Services

The project exemplifies the JET-Juizi partnership: willingness to experiment, learn, and adapt. Not every innovation works as planned, but each provides insights that inform better solutions and move the world forward.

I want to chat about my early-adopter idea for my website

P.S. For other handy tools from Cory Zue, have a look at his other projects https://www.coryzue.com/projects/. From SaaS starters to translation generators, his father’s recipes and even information on Cape Town hikes.

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