Synthesia has long been about using AI to help companies create interactive training videos in minutes, at a fraction of the cost of developing corporate educational materials. The startup’s latest product is making a different bet. The real moat for enterprise AI, he says, is not just generating content, but proving that it works.
On Wednesday, the British startup launched its interactive training product, Role-Play Sessions. It lets employees practice high-stakes conversations like sales pitches, performance reviews, and customer complaints using an AI avatar that speaks, pushes back, and scores against a rubric.
Roleplay is the first release under the broader “Session” platform, with Synthesia planning to expand to other formats including job interviews and candidate screening, TechCrunch has learned exclusively.
The announcement comes as companies take a hard look at whether their investments in AI are paying off. Citing a meta-analysis of learning research, Synthesia argues that most corporate training (which implicitly includes the company’s core video products) falls short of actually changing behavior. Training tends to provide information and demonstrate, but what really encourages you to actually learn something is doing that with feedback.
“Video performs much better than sending text or documents,” Synthesia CEO and co-founder Victor Riparbelli told TechCrunch. “But most things are best learned by doing them, not just reading about them.”
In roleplay, move Synthesia to a more defensible position. While the company’s avatar and voice technology are proprietary, the underlying inference intelligence is from OpenAI. With enhanced layers that include 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.
“There’s a lot of interest from executives in planning their internal talent in ways that have been very difficult to do in the past,” Lipalveli said. “If you have your entire sales team practice with an AI role player, you can get very detailed data about the performance of your entire sales team.”
Synthesia already has several early roleplay customers with large-scale commercial deployments. These include “one of Europe’s top three companies by market capitalization, one of the top five Fortune 100 companies, and one of the world’s largest recruitment agencies,” according to a company spokesperson.
Two of the most common use cases include sales team and leadership training. This is a program that teaches you how to sell products, practice difficult conversations, and more. A lot of it is soft skills training, Riparbelli said.
As with Synthesia’s flagship product, customers can create their own training programs on the platform or, with the help of Synthesia’s consultants, build bespoke solutions that rely in part on the training documentation and context the company already has.
For now, Roleplay is an enterprise product, but as inference costs continue to fall, the goal is to make it more widely available to small businesses, prosumers, and potentially educational institutions in the coming months. Riparbelli believes products like Roleplay represent the next stage in enterprise AI adoption, with companies becoming more focused on proving that AI produces measurable business outcomes rather than whether it looks good in a social media demo.
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