Harvard's $699 Bootcamp Uses AI Avatars of Its Instructors
When Harvard Business School wants to scale personal feedback, it clones its faculty into AI avatars — and students say they love them.
Published: 2026-08-23 Category: Quick Take Sources: TechCrunch
The Setup
Harvard Business School is leaning on AI avatars to provide individual feedback as it seeks to expand its reach. The avatars, built by startup HeyGen, are baked into the eight-week, $699 HBS Foundry bootcamp for entrepreneurs. The program still offers live sessions with real instructors every week — but during practice pitches and mock board meetings, the AI avatars are the ones giving feedback.
What It Actually Feels Like
New York Times reporter Sarah Kessler tried it out herself, pitching an AI-generated copy of Flybridge Capital co-founder Jeff Bussgang. Both the real Bussgang and his digital simulacrum were unimpressed by her "Uber for bananas" idea — but Kessler noticed the virtual version wore a noticeably frozen smile throughout the pitch. The uncanny detail is telling: these avatars are competent enough to critique, yet still betray their artificiality in the margins.
Project director Katharina Rings said she originally pictured the AI component as something closer to a chatbot. But after HBS released a trial version, students asked for a more guided, immersive experience — which pushed the program toward full video avatars rather than text-based coaching.
The Interesting Reaction
Despite broader student skepticism toward AI in education, Foundry participants told Kessler they genuinely like the avatars. Even Bussgang, who calls his digital copy "a little creepy," concedes: "My students love it." That split — finding the avatar uncanny yourself while your audience embraces it — is becoming a recurring theme in this new wave of AI-augmented teaching.
Sharp Analysis
The interesting thing here isn't the avatar tech itself — HeyGen and others have done talking-head clones for a while. It's what the deployment reveals about demand. Individualized feedback has always been the expensive, unscalable part of education. A live instructor can only critique so many pitches. An avatar that "knows" the same framework can give every student a tailored debrief at effectively zero marginal cost.
That's a genuine unlock for a $699 mass-market bootcamp that wants to feel boutique. But the tradeoff deserves scrutiny: does feedback from a frozen-smile simulacrum actually land the same way as feedback from a person? Bussgang's "creepy but beloved" verdict suggests the answer is complicated — and that students may be more comfortable with imperfect AI than we expect.
The deeper trend: elite institutions are quietly becoming the testbeds for mainstream AI teaching tools. If this works, the "AI professor" isn't just a public-sector pilot — it's a commercial product validated by the most prestigious brand in business education.
This quick take is based on TechCrunch's coverage of Harvard Business School's AI avatar instructors.
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Source: TechCrunch, "Harvard's $699 startup bootcamp offers AI avatars of its instructors."