Synthesia’s AI training platform is moving beyond videos into live coaching
TechCrunch Rebecca Bellan
Synthesia's launching AI avatars that let employees practice sales pitches and tough talks, then grade them. It's a pivot from making training videos to proving that training actually works.
Based on reporting by TechCrunch, Rebecca Bellan — read the original for the full story.
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Synthesia built its business on a simple promise: turn a script into a polished corporate training video with an AI avatar, in minutes, at a fraction of the usual production cost. That's still the core product. But the London-based startup's newest release, Roleplay Sessions, suggests it's chasing something harder to fake than good video — evidence that the training actually changes how someone behaves at work.
Roleplay puts employees in front of an AI avatar that argues back. Practice a sales pitch, and the avatar objects. Rehearse a performance review, and it gets defensive. Handle a customer complaint, and it stays annoyed until you fix it. Afterward, the system scores the interaction against a rubric, turning a soft-skills exercise into something a manager can actually measure. Synthesia CEO Victor Riparbelli points to learning research to make the case that video alone rarely moves the needle — people learn by doing, with feedback, not by watching.
Roleplay is the opening act for a bigger platform Synthesia calls Sessions, which TechCrunch has learned will eventually stretch into job interviews and candidate screening. That's a notable expansion for a company that started out replacing PowerPoint decks with talking heads.
There's also a competitive logic here. Synthesia's avatars and voice tech are its own, but the reasoning underneath — the part that actually holds a conversation — runs on OpenAI's models, which any rival can license too. Layering in rubrics, analytics, and performance scoring gives Synthesia something stickier to sell than a slick avatar: a data trail that tells an executive how an entire sales team, or leadership bench, is actually performing. Riparbelli describes clients wanting to
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the same story every enterprise AI vendor is quietly rewriting right now — the flashy demo phase is over, and the money is in whoever can prove ROI with a spreadsheet. Synthesia's smart to build a moat out of scoring and analytics instead of avatars, since the avatar tech was never going to stay differentiated once OpenAI or Google decided to compete on that layer directly.
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