Designing an AI-Assisted Support and Workflow System for International Student Services in Higher Education

International student services in higher education often involve fragmented access to guidance, document-heavy requests, and repeated staff-mediated follow-up across multiple channels. Although chatbots are increasingly discussed in higher education, much of the literature remains more focused on teaching support or FAQ-style interaction than on integrated administrative service workflows. This paper presents SOPHIA, an individually developed AI-assisted support and workflow system for International Student Services in higher education. Adopting a design-oriented information systems approach informed by design science research, the paper examines the problem context, artifact design, technical architecture, and preliminary evaluation of the system. SOPHIA was designed as a bounded service artifact that integrates controlled query handling, form-based request support, support contact and ticket initiation, staff oversight, and maintainable knowledge management within a single environment. A preliminary evaluation involving 12 participants indicated high perceived relevance to the international student support context, with stronger task performance in routine enquiry handling and support contact initiation, while form-based handling and history retrieval revealed clearer refinement needs. The paper contributes by showing how AI-assisted support in higher education can be framed as a workflow-centred, socio-technical, and institutionally governed design problem rather than as a chatbot-only problem. It also offers a context-aware design logic that may inform future development and implementation in international student services and related administrative settings. Keywords: international student services; higher education; AI-assisted support; workflow integration; design-oriented information systems; socio-technical systems; administrative service systems