Synthesia launches Roleplay Sessions to prove AI training works

Synthesia built its business on AI-generated training videos — fast, cheap alternatives to traditional corporate educational content. Its newest product bets that the real moat in enterprise AI isn’t generating content, but proving it worked.

On Wednesday, the British startup launched Roleplay Sessions, an interactive training product that lets employees practice high-stakes conversations — sales pitches, performance reviews, customer complaints — with an AI avatar that talks back, pushes back, and scores them against a rubric. Roleplay is the first release under a broader “Sessions” platform that Synthesia plans to expand into other formats, including job interviews and candidate screening, TechCrunch has exclusively learned.

The launch lands as enterprises scrutinize whether their AI spending is paying off. Citing a meta-analysis of learning research, Synthesia argues most corporate training — including, implicitly, its own core video product — stops short of changing behavior: training tends to inform and demonstrate, but what actually teaches someone is doing the thing itself, paired with feedback. “Video performs way better than text or sending out a document,” 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 product also moves Synthesia into a more defensible position. Its avatar and voice technology are proprietary, but the underlying reasoning intelligence is OpenAI’s; layering on rubrics, performance data, and analytics repositions the company less as an AI avatar maker and more as a performance-management platform with a video front end. Riparbelli said the company is seeing strong interest from managers wanting to map out talent in ways that were previously difficult, since running an entire sales team through an AI role player generates granular performance data. Synthesia already has a handful of early Roleplay customers with scaled rollouts, including — per a company spokesperson — 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 are sales and leadership training, largely soft-skills programs; as with Synthesia’s main product, customers can build their own programs or use Synthesia’s consultants for a bespoke solution built on their existing training material.

Roleplay is enterprise-only for now, but Synthesia’s goal is to widen access to small businesses, prosumers, and potentially educational institutions in the next few months as inference costs keep falling.

Why it matters

Riparbelli sees products like Roleplay as the next phase of enterprise AI adoption, where the test shifts from whether AI looks good in a demo to whether it produces measurable business outcomes.