For years, Synthesia’s core product was simple enough to explain: use AI to help companies make training videos cheaply and quickly. No camera crews, no studios, no six-figure production budgets. Just type a script, pick an avatar, and get a polished video in minutes. It worked well enough to turn the London-based startup into one of Europe’s most recognizable AI companies.
But the company is now making a different kind of bet. According to TechCrunch, Synthesia has launched a product called Roleplay Sessions, where employees practice high-stakes workplace conversations with an AI avatar that responds in real time, pushes back, and then scores their performance against a set rubric. Think sales pitches, performance reviews, customer complaints. The avatar does not just listen. It reacts.
This is a meaningful shift. Synthesia is not just adding a feature. It is trying to reposition itself around a harder problem, one that most corporate training tools have never managed to solve: proving that the training actually changed how someone behaves.
The timing is deliberate. Enterprises are under pressure to show that their AI spending is producing real results, not just impressive demos. Synthesia is leaning into that scrutiny. The company cites a meta-analysis of learning research to argue that most corporate training, including its own video product, stops at informing people rather than changing what they do. Watching a video about how to handle a difficult client is very different from actually practicing it.
“Video performs way better than text or sending out a document,” Synthesia 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.”
Roleplay also puts Synthesia in a stronger competitive position. The company’s avatar and voice technology are its own, but the underlying AI reasoning comes from OpenAI. By building a layer on top that includes rubrics, scoring, and performance analytics, Synthesia is moving away from being an avatar company and toward being a performance management platform. That is a harder thing to copy.
The data angle is a big part of the pitch to large organizations. If an entire sales team runs through the same AI roleplay, managers get granular, comparable data on how individuals are actually performing, something that is nearly impossible to gather from traditional training programs. “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 said.
Roleplay is the first product under a broader “Sessions” platform Synthesia plans to build out over time. Future formats are expected to include job interviews and candidate screening, though those have not launched yet. The company already has paying enterprise customers using Roleplay at scale, including what it describes as one of the top three companies by market cap in Europe, one of the top five Fortune 100 companies, and one of the world’s largest recruitment firms.
The most popular use cases so far are:
- Sales training, such as practicing product pitches or handling objections
- Leadership development, including difficult conversations and performance reviews
- Soft skills coaching more broadly
As with Synthesia’s main video product, companies can build their own training programs on the platform or work with Synthesia’s consultants to create something custom, drawing on the company’s existing training documents and internal context.
For now, Roleplay is an enterprise-only product. But Riparbelli says the plan is to open it up to small businesses, prosumers, and potentially schools and universities within the next few months, as the cost of running AI inference continues to drop. He sees products like Roleplay as what the next phase of enterprise AI adoption actually looks like: less about what AI can do in a polished demo, more about whether it moves a measurable business needle.
