Revolutionizing Corporate Training with AI-Powered Live Coaching
For years, Synthesia has been at the forefront of using AI to create interactive training videos for enterprises, helping them save time and resources. However, the company’s newest product, Roleplay Sessions, is taking a bold step forward by shifting the focus from content creation to live coaching. This innovative platform is designed to help employees practice high-stakes conversations like sales pitches, performance reviews, and customer complaints with an AI avatar that talks back, pushes back, and then scores them against a rubric.
Roleplay Sessions is the first release under Synthesia’s broader ‘Sessions’ platform, which aims to expand into other formats, including job interviews and candidate screening. The launch of this product comes at a critical time when enterprises are reassessing their AI spend and looking for tangible business outcomes. Synthesia’s CEO and co-founder, Victor Riparbelli, emphasizes the importance of moving beyond mere information dissemination in corporate training.
According to Riparbelli, ‘Video performs way better than text or sending out a document, but for most things, we learn the best by actually practicing something rather than just reading it.’ This insight is backed by a meta-analysis of learning research, which highlights the limitations of traditional training methods. By incorporating role-playing and feedback, Synthesia’s AI-powered coaching platform seeks to bridge the gap between knowledge acquisition and actual behavior change.
Roleplay Sessions also marks a significant shift in Synthesia’s positioning in the market. While the company’s avatar and voice technology remain proprietary, the underlying reasoning intelligence is built on OpenAI’s foundation. By adding a layer of rubrics, performance data, and analytics, Synthesia is transforming itself into a performance-management platform with a video front end. This strategic move enables the company to offer more value to its customers and differentiate itself from competitors.
As an enterprise offering, Roleplay Sessions is currently being used by a few early customers, including a top-three company by market cap in Europe, a top-five Fortune 100 company, and one of the biggest recruitment companies in the world. The platform is being utilized for soft skills training, such as teaching sales teams how to sell a product or have a difficult conversation. Synthesia’s consultants work closely with customers to create bespoke training programs that incorporate existing documents and context.
Looking ahead, Synthesia aims to make Roleplay Sessions more accessible to small businesses, prosumers, and educational institutions as inference costs continue to fall. Riparbelli believes that products like Roleplay Sessions represent the next phase of enterprise AI adoption, where companies prioritize measurable business outcomes over mere AI-driven content.
By embracing live coaching and performance analytics, Synthesia is poised to revolutionize the way enterprises approach corporate training. As Riparbelli notes, ‘From a managerial executive layer, we’re seeing huge interest in mapping out the talent in their company in a way that’s been really difficult to do before.’ With Roleplay Sessions, Synthesia is empowering companies to unlock the full potential of their employees and drive tangible business results.
