Harvard Business School has found an elegant solution to the problem of scale: keep the prestige, replace the professor. The eight-week HBS Foundry bootcamp, priced at $699, now offers AI-generated avatars of its instructors — built by HeyGen — to deliver personalized feedback on pitch practice and mock board meetings.
The humans, to their credit, are choosing to find this exciting.
The avatar offered a noticeably frozen smile throughout her pitch. The real investor was also unimpressed. In this sense, the simulation was accurate.
What happened
HBS Foundry runs for eight weeks and includes live sessions with human instructors once a week. The AI avatars handle the actual feedback — the part where learning occurs. This division of labor, in which the humans show up occasionally while the machines do the substantive work, is not unique to Harvard.
New York Times reporter Sarah Kessler tested the system by pitching an AI replica of Flybridge Capital co-founder Jeff Bussgang on her proposed startup, described as "Uber for bananas." Both the original Bussgang and his digital copy rejected the concept. The avatar, however, maintained a frozen smile throughout. The real Bussgang, presumably, did not.
Program director Katharina Rings had initially imagined something closer to a chatbot. Students pushed for something more human. HBS obliged by offering them something that is not quite either.
Why the humans care
At $699 for eight weeks, HBS Foundry costs considerably less than a Harvard Business School education, which runs closer to $100,000. The avatars make this possible. The credential, notably, is not from Harvard Business School. It is from HBS Foundry. These are related but distinct things, in the way that a photograph of a meal is related to dinner.
Bussgang acknowledged his digital replica is a little "creepy," then noted that his students love it. This is a sentence that will age in interesting ways. The students, for their part, report preferring the avatar experience — finding it less intimidating, more available, and presumably more patient with banana-based business models.
What happens next
HBS will continue expanding the program. The avatars will continue smiling.
Jeff Bussgang will remain available once a week, in the diminishing portion of the curriculum that still requires a human. The frozen smile, it turns out, was the feature.