Harvard's $699 startup bootcamp uses AI avatars of its instructors

Harvard Business School has found a way to be in two places at once: the school's new startup bootcamp uses AI-generated replicas of its real instructors to give founders feedback whenever they need it. It is one of the most concrete tests yet of whether students will accept being taught — or at least coached — by a digital double.

Harvard Business School is putting AI avatars of its own faculty to work teaching entrepreneurship. The school's eight-week HBS Foundry bootcamp costs $699 and pairs weekly live sessions with AI replicas of the instructors, built by avatar startup HeyGen, which deliver individual feedback during practice pitches and mock board meetings. The New York Times' Sarah Kessler took the system for a test drive by pitching a plan for "Uber for bananas" to a virtual copy of Flybridge Capital co-founder Jeff Bussgang — and both the real Bussgang and his simulacrum were unimpressed, though only the digital one did it with what Kessler described as a noticeably frozen smile.

Why it matters: individual coaching from named faculty has always been the scarce, expensive part of elite business education, and Harvard is quietly testing whether software can scale it at $699 a head. The early reception is notably warmer than the campus backlash elsewhere — Foundry participants told the Times they like the avatars, and Bussgang conceded his double is a little "creepy" but added, "My students love it." Project director Katharina Rings originally pictured something closer to a chatbot, but a trial version showed students wanted a more guided experience. That's a useful signal about where AI actually fits in education: not open-ended answers, but structured rehearsal — pitches, board meetings, repetition with judgment attached.

Our take: feedback-on-demand is precisely the use case where avatars clear the credibility bar. The stakes are low, the reps are high, and nobody's grade depends on the machine. The harder question sits underneath: what happens to the market value of "taught by Harvard faculty" once part of the faculty is a HeyGen render — and whether a bootcamp price point is the trojan horse that normalizes synthetic teaching across programs that cost fifty times as much.

What to watch: whether HBS extends avatar-led coaching beyond the bootcamp into its degree programs, and how quickly other business schools copy the format rather than build their own.

Would you take pitch feedback from an AI clone of a professor — or would the frozen smile kill it for you? Tell us in the comments.

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