Harvard’s $699 startup bootcamp offers AI avatars of its instructors

Harvard Business School is using AI avatars made by HeyGen in its eight-week, $699 HBS Foundry bootcamp for entrepreneurs. The avatars provide feedback during practice pitches and board meetings, while live instructors still lead weekly sessions. Participants reportedly like the more guided experience, even as one instructor called his digital copy a little “creepy.”

The program shows how elite institutions are testing AI avatars as a scalable layer for personalized coaching without fully replacing human instructors. If students accept these tools, business education and professional training may increasingly blend live teaching with synthetic feedback systems.