Synthesia's AI Training Platform Takes a Bold New Step

Synthesia's AI training platform has been making waves in the enterprise space with its ability to create interactive training videos in minutes. However, the company is now taking a bold new step by introducing live coaching capabilities to its platform.

From Videos to Live Coaching

For years, Synthesia's pitch has been centered around using AI to help enterprises create interactive training videos. However, the company's newest product is making a different bet - that the real moat in enterprise AI isn't just generating content, but in proving that it worked.

"Video performs way better than text or sending out a document," Synthesia CEO and co-founder Victor Riparbelli told TechCrunch. "But for most things, we learn the best by actually practicing something rather than just reading it."

The Launch of Roleplay Sessions

On Wednesday, Synthesia launched Roleplay Sessions, an interactive training product where employees can 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.

• The launch comes as enterprises take a harder look at whether their AI spend is paying off.
• Citing a meta-analysis of learning research, Synthesia argues that most corporate training stops short of actually changing behavior.
• The trainings tend to inform and demonstrate, but what really pushes someone into actually learning something is doing that thing, along with feedback.

A More Defensible Position

Roleplay also moves Synthesia into a more defensible position. The company's avatar and voice technology are proprietary, but the underlying reasoning intelligence is OpenAI's. By tacking on a layer that includes rubrics, performance data, and analytics, Synthesia is positioning itself less as an AI avatar company and more as a performance-management platform with a video front end.

Early Adoption and Future Plans

Synthesia already has a few early Roleplay customers with scaled commercial rollouts, including one of the top three companies by market cap in Europe, one of the top five Fortune 100, and one of the biggest recruitment companies in the world.

• The two most popular use cases involve training sales teams and leadership - programs like practicing how to sell a product or have a difficult conversation.
• Much of it is soft skills training, Riparbelli said.
• As with Synthesia's main product, customers can either create their own training programs on the platform or enlist the help of Synthesia's consultants to build a bespoke solution that relies in part on whatever training documents and context the company already has.

The Future of Enterprise AI

Riparbelli believes products like Roleplay represent the next phase of enterprise AI adoption, where companies care less about whether AI looks good in a social media demo and more about proving it generates measurable business outcomes.