Moving from Video Production to Real-Time Interactive Training
The British startup Synthesia, widely recognized for its platform that generates AI-driven corporate training videos, is making a major strategic move. The company has announced the launch of a new product that expands its capabilities far beyond the passive production of video content, pivoting toward real-time interactive training. For several years, Synthesia's core value proposition to enterprises has been centered around utilizing artificial intelligence to help create corporate training videos within minutes, and at a fraction of the traditional cost associated with developing such educational materials. However, the startup's latest product represents a different bet on the future of the enterprise market: the company believes that the true competitive moat in enterprise AI does not lie solely in content generation, but rather in the ability to prove that the learning process actually worked and achieved real, measurable results on the ground.
According to an exclusive report by TechCrunch, the company officially launched its new interactive training product, "Roleplay Sessions," on Wednesday. This new tool enables employees to practice simulations of high-stakes, high-importance conversations. These include activities such as sales pitches, periodic performance reviews, and handling complex customer complaints. The training is conducted directly with an AI-powered avatar that engages in a dynamic two-way dialogue, presents opposing viewpoints, and challenges the user. Afterward, the system scores the participant's performance based on a predefined evaluation rubric. This product is the first release under a broader platform known as "Sessions," which Synthesia plans to expand into other interactive formats in the future. Among these planned additions are job interviews and candidate screening processes, as exclusively learned by TechCrunch.
Addressing the Return on Investment in Enterprise AI
The timing of this launch comes at a time when enterprises are scrutinizing their financial investments in artificial intelligence tools much more closely than before, demanding clear proof of return on investment. Citing a meta-analysis of learning research, Synthesia argues that the vast majority of existing corporate training methods—including, implicitly, the company’s own core video creation product—stop just short of driving actual behavioral changes in employees. These traditional training approaches tend to focus primarily on informing and demonstrating. However, research indicates that the key factor driving a person to truly learn a skill and modify their behavior is actively performing the task itself, combined with receiving continuous, actionable feedback on their performance.
Victor Riparbelli, CEO and co-founder of Synthesia, shared the core insights behind this new development in an interview with TechCrunch: "Video performs way better than text or sending out a document. But for most things, we learn the best by actually practicing something rather than just reading it."
Deepening Competitive Positioning Through Technological Integration
The development of the Roleplay product repositions Synthesia into a more defensible and competitive posture in the market. While the company's avatar and voice synthesis technologies are proprietary—developed entirely in-house—the reasoning intelligence powering the interactive dialogue system relies on models developed by OpenAI. By overlaying a structured framework that includes built-in evaluation rubrics, performance data, and detailed analytics, Synthesia is shifting its positioning: rather than operating merely as an AI avatar generation company, it is establishing itself as an enterprise performance-management and employee-evaluation platform with a visual, video-based front end.
"From a managerial executive layer, we're seeing huge interest in mapping out the talent in their company in a way that's been really difficult to do before," Riparbelli explained. "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."
Commercial Adoption, Case Studies, and Future Outlook
According to a company spokesperson, Synthesia has already secured several early customers that have deployed the Roleplay product in large-scale commercial rollouts. These early adopters include one of the top three companies by market cap in Europe, one of the top five companies in the Fortune 100, and one of the largest recruitment and staffing firms in the world. Currently, the two most common use cases and applications for the platform are sales team training and executive leadership development. These programs involve practical training on how to effectively sell a product or how to conduct difficult, complex conversations within an organization. Riparbelli noted that a significant portion of these training modules is focused specifically on soft skills development.
Similar to Synthesia’s core video generation product, enterprise clients have two options: they can create their own independent training programs directly on the platform, or they can collaborate with Synthesia's team of consultants to build a bespoke solution. These custom solutions can leverage the existing training documentation and organizational context that the enterprise already possesses. Currently, the Roleplay product is offered as a dedicated enterprise solution for large organizations. However, the company aims to make the tool much more widely accessible and affordable for small businesses, individual professional users (prosumers), and potentially educational institutions over the coming months, as AI model processing and inference costs continue to fall across the industry.
Riparbelli is confident that interactive products like Roleplay represent the next major wave of enterprise AI adoption globally. In this upcoming phase, businesses and organizations will place far less emphasis on whether an AI tool looks impressive in a social media demo, and will instead focus intensely on the practical ability to prove that the technology generates clear, tangible, and measurable business outcomes in the real world.