Synthesia’s AI training platform is moving beyond videos into live coaching

For years, Synthesia’s goal was to use AI to help businesses create interactive training videos, in minutes, at a fraction of the cost normally associated with developing educational materials for businesses. The startup’s latest product makes a different bet: that the real challenge in enterprise AI isn’t just generating content, but proving it works.

The British startup was launched on Wednesday Role-play sessionsan interactive training product that allows employees to practice high-stakes conversations, such as sales pitches, performance reviews, and customer complaints, with an AI avatar that talks back, pushes back, and then scores them based on a rubric.

Roleplay is the first release under a broader ‘Sessions’ platform. Synthesia plans to expand into other formats, including job interviews and candidate screening, TechCrunch has exclusively learned.

The launch comes as companies take a closer look at whether their AI spending is paying off. With reference to a meta-analysis of learning researchSynthesia argues that most corporate training – including implicitly its own core video product – fails to actually change behavior. The training tends to inform and demonstrate, but what really pushes someone to actually learn something is doing it, along with feedback.

“Video performs much better than text or sending a document,” Synthesia CEO and co-founder Victor Riparbelli told TechCrunch. “But for most things, we learn best by actually practicing something rather than just reading it.”

Roleplay also puts Synthesia in a more defensible position. The company’s avatar and voice technology are proprietary, but the underlying reasoning intelligence is that of OpenAI. By adding a layer that includes rubrics, performance data, and analytics, Synthesia is positioning itself less as an AI avatar company and more as a performance management platform with a video front end.

“From the management level we see great interest in mapping the talent in their company in a way that was previously very difficult,” says Riparbelli. “If you have your entire sales team practice with an AI role player, you can get very detailed data on how your sales team is doing overall.”

Synthesia already has a few early Roleplay customers with scaled commercial rollouts, including “one of the three largest companies by market capitalization in Europe, one of the top five of the Fortune 100 and one of the largest recruitment companies in the world,” according to a company spokesperson.

The two most popular use cases involve training sales teams and leadership: programs like practicing how to sell a product or having a difficult conversation. A big part of it is soft skills training, Riparbelli said.

As with Synthesia’s main product, customers can create their own training programs on the platform or enlist the help of Synthesia’s consultants to build a custom solution that relies in part on the training documents and context the company already has.

Roleplay is an enterprise offering for now, but the goal is to offer it more broadly to small businesses, prosumers, and possibly educational institutions in the coming months as inference costs continue to decline. Riparbelli believes that products like Roleplay represent the next phase of AI adoption in enterprises, where companies care less about whether AI looks good in a social media demo and more about proving that it drives measurable business results.