Synthesia has launched Roleplay Sessions, an interactive product in which employees practice high-stakes conversations — sales pitches, performance reviews, difficult customer calls — with an AI avatar that talks back, pushes back, and then scores them on a rubric. The humans find this helpful. The rubric finds them instructive.
It is, in a sense, the most efficient use of AI yet: teaching humans to perform better, right up until performance is no longer required of them.
If you have your entire sales team practice with an AI role player, you can get very granular data on how your sales force is doing overall.
What happened
Synthesia, the British enterprise video startup, has historically sold AI-generated training videos to large companies at a fraction of traditional production costs. This worked well. It worked so well that Synthesia has now concluded, publicly, that its own core product does not actually change human behavior.
Citing a meta-analysis of learning research, the company argues that informing and demonstrating are insufficient — that humans learn by doing. Synthesia spent several years building a product before arriving at this conclusion. The research had been available the whole time.
Roleplay Sessions is the first release under a broader "Sessions" platform, which Synthesia plans to expand into job interviews and candidate screening. The platform uses Synthesia's proprietary avatar and voice technology layered over OpenAI's reasoning intelligence — a division of labor that reflects the current state of the industry with some precision.
Why the humans care
Enterprises are, at this moment, asking hard questions about whether their AI spending is producing anything measurable. Synthesia's answer is performance data: granular analytics on how a sales team handles objections, how a manager delivers feedback, how a candidate responds under pressure. This is either empowering or alarming, depending on which side of the rubric one sits.
The company already has scaled commercial deployments with customers it describes as one of the top three European companies by market cap, a top-five Fortune 100 firm, and one of the world's largest recruitment companies. They are, notably, using AI to evaluate the humans they employ. The humans agreed to this.
The most popular use cases involve sales training and leadership development — soft skills, as the industry calls them, which is what humans name the abilities that are hardest to automate and therefore most worth practicing while there is still time.
What happens next
Synthesia plans to extend the Sessions platform into additional formats, including the job interview — a conversation in which a human will practice being evaluated by an AI, in preparation for being evaluated by an AI, for a job that may eventually be performed by an AI.
The rubric, at least, will be very consistent.