When Harvard Lets AI Avatars Grade Classroom Pitches

A digital lecturer watches you present. No eye contact. A steady smile. The room is virtual. The feedback is not.

Harvard Business School has quietly rolled out AI-powered instructor avatars inside its HBS Foundry program, an eight-week course now priced at about €643. Students still join weekly live sessions with human instructors, but practice pitch assessments and simulated coaching encounters are handled by digital replicas of faculty.

Small group coaching, scaled

The avatars were built by HeyGen, a startup that converts recorded instruction and bios into animated, speaking likenesses. A New York Times reporter tested the system by pitching a hypothetical business plan to a simulated version of investor and educator Jeff Bussgang. The avatar listened with a neutral expression and an unvarying smile, delivering structured feedback that followed the program’s rubric.

Katrina Rings, the project director, says the initiative didn’t start with photoreal faces in mind. The pilot began more like a chatbot, a text-first helper. Students pushed back. They wanted something more guided. They wanted a sense of being seen. So the team layered on simulated faces and a tighter feedback script.

There are predictable concerns. Does an avatar convey nuance? Can it read panic in a student’s voice? Some academics worry about flattening pedagogy into canned responses. Yet many participants report satisfaction. 'My students love it,' says Bussgang, who also helped design the course exercises. For practical purposes, avatars offer consistent, on-demand critique when live faculty time is scarce.

Think of the choice this way: reach or reverie. Avatars increase access and repeatability. They let more entrepreneurs run pitch cycles, iterate, and learn at odd hours. But they also force a trade-off with spontaneity. The feedback is reliable. It is not always warm.

What matters next is not the novelty of a talking face. It is whether these systems deepen learning or merely simulate it. Will future cohorts treat avatars as stepping stones toward higher-quality human coaching, or as stand-ins when faculty bandwidth runs thin? Either outcome reshapes how business education scales.