Follett in February launched Destiny AI, a set of artificial intelligence (AI) tools for its Destiny library management system. Designed as a personal data assistant for K–12 librarians—there are currently no student-facing features—Destiny AI helps automate routine tasks, streamline data organization, retrieve quick insights into a library’s collection, reduce workloads, and boost productivity.

The company aimed to make it easier for K–12 librarians to access data so that they could spend less time on administrative tasks and more time focusing on student engagement, Chris Porter, CEO of Follett Software, said in an announcement. “While AI can’t replace the essential role of librarians as curators of knowledge, guides to information literacy, and champions of lifelong learning, we are excited about the ability of Destiny AI to support and strengthen the resources available to them.”

Shannon McClintock Miller, director of innovation of instructional technology and library media for Van Meter Community School (VMCS), IA, was involved in the final stages of Destiny AI’s development, providing feedback to Follett as VMCS participated in a beta test last fall. In a case study published by Follett, Miller said that the AI feature had made it easier to create reports for the school board, generate grant applications, write year-end summaries, find out how many books were checked out during the past 12 months broken down by grade level, quantify the value of books cataloged during the past year to demonstrate the impact of new acquisitions, and justify funding requests to enhance VMCS’s nonfiction offerings.

“Every day…we update our circulation stats,” Miller told SLJ. “We keep track of it throughout the year on a counter but also online. [Using Destiny AI] we’re able to ask that—just type it in and get an answer really quickly.” Miller added that it has also been helpful with more complex tasks, such as suggestions for displays and bulletin boards for collections, or lesson plans for individual titles. “At the beginning of the year, I would say ‘give me 10 books that are great to recommend for back-to-school for second grade,’ and it would pull [suggestions] from our collection.” It can also recommend books for acquisition based on similar simple queries, she said.

Miller also said that it had been helpful during the beginning of this school year. “We got a lot of new books over the summer, and we were able to pull lists of what had been cataloged since the end of May,” she said. “What new books do we have that we can showcase?... You want to make sure your teachers and your kids know about them.”

“Conversational reporting” is one of Destiny AI’s primary features, enabling users to generate detailed reports on resource usage, overdue items, genre trends, and more by using simple natural language prompts, eliminating the need for complex report builders and spreadsheets. According to Follett, the new Destiny AI tools were created with the SAFE (Secure, Adaptable, Factual, Ethical) AI Framework, and all data remains private and secure within the Destiny platform.

“Just getting to data could require SQL programming…Excel macros,” Peter D’Orsi, senior director of product management for Follett Software told SLJ, explaining how these challenges led his team to develop Destiny AI. The goal was to “take natural language, and convert it to complex database lookups. We know that a lot of librarians were asking questions like ‘I need to build a budget’ or ‘I need to understand collection health.’ So how do we very quickly convert that [into a complex database query] on the back end? Over time, we started to add more and more functionality to allow librarians to ask questions about weeding and other activities.”

Citing a few examples of potential time savings, D’Orsi said that while developing Destiny AI, his team had talked to several school districts “that were faced with the problem of having to pull circulation reports from every school in the district.… Even if that’s a prebuilt report within Destiny Library Manager today, you still have to compile potentially dozens or hundreds of schools’ data into one report…. The system today is able to respond in three or four seconds, on average, to a lot of these reports. The tool allows you to not just ask questions about ‘how many books do I have available?’ [but] you can pull a pretty complex report on ‘what are the top circulating books from these two date ranges?’ and export that as a .CSV and three seconds later you have that data. If they’re trying to build a budget request or take data to make a purchasing decision, the goal is to remove that friction.”

Alexandra McMillin, director, brand and communications for Follett Software, said that Destiny AI could also be used to help school libraries with advocacy, noting that “these tools make it very easy for librarians to report and collect information that they can share with superintendents and district leaders…. That’s something that we’ve heard quite a bit as well.”

Since its launch earlier this year, Destiny AI’s features have expanded across the platform to include Destiny Resource Manager for technology leaders and Follett’s Aspen Student Information System for student information management. “We started from use cases around reporting. We’ve since added the ability to ask questions kind of about anything” within a school’s Destiny system, D’Orsi said. But, he emphasized, these AI tools have been “tailor made” by Follett and unlike large language model AI systems such as ChatGPT, they are “guard railed to only respond to K–12 questions.”