For several years, Synthesia has focused on utilizing AI to assist businesses in generating engaging training videos quickly and at a significantly lower cost than traditional methods. However, the company’s latest offering shifts its focus, emphasizing that the key advantage in enterprise AI may lie not just in content creation, but in demonstrating its effectiveness.
On Wednesday, the UK-based company introduced Roleplay Sessions, an interactive training tool allowing employees to engage in critical conversations—such as sales pitches, performance evaluations, and handling customer complaints—using an AI avatar that responds, challenges them, and provides feedback based on a scoring system.
Roleplay is the initial product within a larger “Sessions” platform, which Synthesia plans to expand to include various scenarios, like job interviews and candidate evaluations. This strategic move comes as companies reassess the return on investment from their AI expenditures. Synthesia emphasizes, supported by a meta-analysis on learning, that many corporate training efforts—including their core video service—often fail to effect real behavioral change. While training can inform and demonstrate, genuine learning requires practice coupled with constructive feedback.
“Video is significantly more effective than text-based materials or documents,” stated Victor Riparbelli, CEO and co-founder of Synthesia. “However, you tend to learn best by actively engaging in the practice, rather than merely reading about it.”
The introduction of Roleplay strengthens Synthesia’s market position. Although the company’s avatar and voice technology are proprietary, its foundational AI intelligence is sourced from OpenAI. By adding features such as performance metrics, rubrics, and analytics, Synthesia is evolving from being seen solely as an AI avatar provider to a more comprehensive performance management platform enhanced by video capabilities.
“From a managerial perspective, there’s significant interest in accurately mapping talent within organizations, which has been challenging until now,” Riparbelli noted. “If an entire sales team undergoes practice sessions with an AI role player, it yields detailed insights into the overall performance of the sales force.”
Synthesia has already secured a handful of early clients for Roleplay, including a leading European company by market capitalization, a top five Fortune 100 corporation, and one of the largest recruitment firms globally, according to a spokesperson.
The primary applications of Roleplay focus on training sales personnel and leadership, often revolving around soft skill development, such as techniques for pitching products or managing tough conversations, as explained by Riparbelli.
Similar to Synthesia’s primary product, clients have the option to design their own training initiatives using the platform or collaborate with Synthesia’s consultants to create tailored solutions based on their existing training resources and context.
Currently targeting enterprises, Synthesia aims to expand access to small businesses, individual professionals, and educational institutions in the months ahead, particularly as costs associated with inference decline. Riparbelli believes that innovations like Roleplay signify a new stage in enterprise AI adoption, where organizations prioritize tangible, measurable business outcomes over the superficial appeal of AI demonstrations on social media.
