For years, Synthesia’s pitch has been to use AI to help businesses create interactive training videos, in minutes, at a fraction of the cost typically associated with developing business educational materials. The new product of the startup makes a different bet – that the real trench in the business AI is not only to generate content, but to prove that it worked.
On Wednesday, the British startup launched Roleplay Sessions, an interactive training product where employees can practice high-level conversations like sales pitches, performance reviews, and customer complaints with an AI avatar that responds, reverses, and finds them through a rubric.
Roleplay is the first release under the broader “Sessions” platform Synthesia plans to expand into other formats, including job interviews and candidate screenings, TechCrunch has learned exclusively.
The launch comes as businesses take a closer look at whether investment in AI is paying off. Citing a meta-analysis of academic studies, Synthesia says that most corporate training — including, apparently, its flagship video product — stops short of changing behavior. Training often informs and demonstrates, but what really pushes a person to learn something is doing that thing, and feedback.
“Video works better than text or sending a document,” Synthesia CEO and co-founder Victor Riparbelli told TechCrunch. But in most things, we learn best by practicing something rather than just learning it.
Casting also moves Synthesia to a more secure location. The company’s avatar and voice technologies are related, but the underlying artificial intelligence is OpenAI. By looking at a layer that includes rubrics, performance data, and analytics, Synthesia positions itself less as an AI avatar company and more as a performance management platform with a video front end.
“From CEOs, we’re seeing a lot of interest in bringing talent to their company in a way that was very difficult to do before,” Riparbelli said. “If you have your entire sales team with an AI player, you can get clear data on how your sales force is doing overall.”
Synthesia already has several of Roleplay’s first customers with a limited commercial rollout, including “one of the top three companies by market value in Europe, one of the top five Fortune 100 companies, and one of the largest employers in the world,” according to a company spokesperson.
Two of the most popular use cases involve training sales teams and leadership – programs like practicing how to sell a product or have a difficult conversation. A lot of it is soft skills training, Riparbelli said.
As Synthesia’s core product, customers can build their own training programs on the platform or enlist the help of Synthesia’s experts to create a customized solution based on any training documents and context the company already has.
Roleplay is an enterprise offering at the moment, but the goal is to offer it more widely to small businesses, prosumers, and potentially educational institutions in the next few months as the cost of imaging continues to drop. Riparbelli believes that products like Roleplay represent the next phase of enterprise AI adoption, where companies don’t care if AI looks good in a social media demo and so on by proving it produces measurable business results.
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