Harvard Business School is running an eight-week startup bootcamp, called Foundry, that costs $699 and includes AI video avatars of its instructors, TechCrunch reports. Students use them to practise pitches and get feedback.
The avatars are built with HeyGen, a company that makes AI-generated video. They are not chatbots. They are moving likenesses of real teachers, and one participant noticed a frozen smile.
What this is, and what it is not
The distinction is worth drawing before anything else, because the headline invites a misreading.
This is not a Harvard degree. Foundry is a non-degree programme, priced at $699 for eight weeks, which places it in the same category as the online and executive offerings that most large universities now run as separate businesses under the parent institution's name. Nobody is being taught by an avatar in place of a professor in an MBA classroom.
Nor is anyone being replaced. Jeff Bussgang, a co-founder of Flybridge Capital and an instructor at the school, has had an avatar made of himself and is still teaching. "My students love it," he told TechCrunch, while allowing that the copy is "a little creepy".
Katharina Rings, the project's director, had originally envisaged something closer to a chatbot. What was built instead was video.
Why a likeness rather than a chatbot
The choice is more interesting than it first appears, because a chatbot would have been easier, cheaper and less strange.
The reason to put a face on it is that pitching is a performance delivered to a person. A founder practising a pitch is rehearsing eye contact, timing and the recovery from an interruption, none of which a text box exercises. If the point of the tool is repetition of a social act, then the social element has to be simulated, however imperfectly.
Which is also why the frozen smile matters. An avatar that is nearly but not quite a person is a well-documented problem in this field, and a student rehearsing in front of one is practising against something that behaves like nothing they will meet in a real room.
The question the reporting does not answer
Consent and money.
The article does not establish whether the instructors whose likenesses are used have signed anything, what those agreements say, or whether anyone is paid for the use of their face. Bussgang's remarks make clear he agreed. Nothing establishes the terms, or what happens to his avatar if he stops teaching at the school, or whether it can be used in programmes he has not approved.
That is not a small gap. A university that creates a durable digital likeness of an employee is creating an asset that outlasts the employment relationship, and the terms governing it are the whole of the protection the person has. It is the same question the acting and voice industries have spent several years litigating, arriving at answers that treat likeness rights as something to be bargained over rather than assumed.
No enrolment figures are given, and the report records no criticism from faculty or students. Participants are described as responding positively.
We verified this from a single publication and have not seen the programme's terms or spoken to anyone involved.
