Harvard’s $699 startup bootcamp offers AI avatars of its instructors
TechCrunch Anthony Ha ● Covered by 2 sources
Harvard Business School is using AI avatars from HeyGen to give feedback in a $699 bootcamp. The odd part: students seem to like the virtual instructors more than a plain chatbot.
Based on reporting by TechCrunch, Anthony Ha — read the original for the full story.
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Harvard Business School is betting that AI can help it scale a very human thing: feedback. In its eight-week HBS Foundry bootcamp for entrepreneurs, participants pay $699 and get weekly live sessions with instructors, plus AI avatars that critique practice pitches and board meetings.
Those avatars come from HeyGen. They’re not there for decoration. They’re the ones giving individual responses while the real instructors run the live parts of the program.
New York Times reporter Sarah Kessler tested the setup by pitching an AI-generated version of Flybridge Capital co-founder Jeff Bussgang. The fake Bussgang, like the real one, was not impressed by her “Uber for bananas” idea. Kessler said the avatar’s smile looked visibly frozen, which is either a bug or the perfect symbol of where business education is going.
Katharina Rings, who directs the program, said she first imagined something more like a chatbot. But after HBS released a trial version, students asked for a more guided experience. That seems to be the real story here: not that Harvard has fallen in love with AI, but that it found a format students would actually use.
Bussgang himself called his digital copy a little creepy. He also said, “My students love it.” That may be the most Harvard sentence possible right now: a bit unsettling, a bit polished, and still very much for sale.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the kind of AI adoption that actually makes sense: narrow, specific, and obviously supervised. The industry keeps trying to sell giant all-purpose models, but students apparently wanted a guided critic, not a chatbot with a personality disorder. If more schools used AI this way, the hype would get smaller and the product would get better, which is usually how progress should work.
Read more about this at: TechCrunch
