Harvard Sells AI Faculty Clones as Startup Mentors for $699

Harvard Sells AI Faculty Clones as Startup Mentors for $699
Harvard Business School is putting a price on a professor’s digital double: $699 for an eight-week startup bootcamp where AI avatars critique founders before the real stakes begin. The promise is scale; the unresolved question is how much of an elite education can be reproduced on screen.

Through HBS Foundry, an AI-native workspace for entrepreneurs, participants rehearse investor pitches, sales calls and board meetings with AI versions of seven HBS professors and senior lecturers. The programme pairs those simulations with weekly live sessions and ends with a chance to pitch investors for $100,000. Harvard says 760 founders have taken part so far.

The avatars, built by HeyGen, emerged after an early trial convinced students that a chatbot was not enough; they wanted a more guided experience. In one test, a reporter pitched an AI copy of venture capitalist Jeff Bussgang on an “Uber for bananas” concept. Both the human and virtual Bussgang rejected it, though the avatar reportedly delivered the verdict with a conspicuously frozen smile.

Foundry director Kat Rings says the demand came from founders seeking tougher rehearsal before meetings with mentors and investors: “The idea for the AI experiences came from founders themselves.” Faculty involved frame the tool as preparation, not replacement. “The goal isn’t to create a substitute for me,” professor Shikhar Ghosh said, arguing that practice with the clone leaves live sessions for judgment and conversation.

That distinction is central to the experiment. Supporters see a comparatively low-cost route into Harvard’s entrepreneurial network for people who may never attend the school. Critics of AI in education, meanwhile, have warned that automated teaching can hollow out the relationship students believe they are buying. As education consultant Lindsay Tanne Howe put it, AI may scale a professor’s knowledge and even “some version” of their judgment, “but what it can’t replicate is everything that happens between people.”

For now, HBS is wagering that founders will accept the uncanny avatar as a useful sparring partner—so long as the human professor remains part of the deal.

Continue reading https://foxvector.com/stories/01a0380a-4bbe-12a9-7308-340044c34b8d