Synthesia has spent the last several years convincing corporate learning teams that an AI avatar reading a script could replace a camera crew, a studio, and a nervous employee standing in front of a teleprompter. That pitch worked well enough to build a company valued in the billions. Now the London based startup is making a bet that the video itself was never the hard part. On July 22, 2026, Synthesia launched Roleplay Sessions, a new product line that pushes its platform from passive video watching into live, interactive coaching, and it signals a broader shift in how enterprise AI companies plan to prove their value.
A New Chapter for Corporate Training
For most of Synthesia's history, the product story was simple: type a script, pick an avatar, and out comes a polished training video in minutes instead of weeks. That approach solved a real problem. Filming, editing, and localizing corporate training content used to be slow and expensive, and Synthesia's avatars made it possible for compliance, onboarding, and product training videos to be produced at a fraction of the traditional cost.
But video, no matter how well produced, is still a one way format. Employees watch, maybe answer a quiz question, and move on. Synthesia's own internal research, along with a broader body of workplace learning studies, points to a familiar problem: watching someone demonstrate a skill and actually being able to perform that skill under pressure are two very different things. That gap is exactly what Roleplay Sessions is designed to close.
What Synthesia Has Built So Far
Synthesia's core platform lets organizations generate training videos using AI avatars and synthetic voices in more than 160 languages, without cameras, actors, or studio time. Enterprise customers such as Microsoft and Nike have used it to produce everything from compliance modules to leadership training. The company has leaned heavily on speed and cost savings as its selling points, and it now counts well over a million users on its platform.
That scale gave Synthesia a strong foothold in the learning and development, or L&D, market, but it also exposed the platform's ceiling. A well made video can inform and demonstrate, yet most L&D leaders will admit that the videos alone rarely change behavior on their own. Employees still freeze during a tough client call, still stumble through a performance review, and still avoid difficult conversations with a direct report. Synthesia's leadership decided the next phase of growth had to address that gap directly rather than simply making better videos.
Introducing Roleplay Sessions
Roleplay Sessions is the first product released under a wider platform Synthesia is calling Sessions. It lets employees practice high stakes conversations, sales pitches, performance reviews, customer complaints, and similar scenarios with an AI avatar that responds in real time, pushes back, asks follow up questions, and then scores the employee's performance against a defined rubric.
"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," said Synthesia CEO and co-founder Victor Riparbelli.
The company built Roleplay directly into Synthesia Studio, its existing production platform, so training videos and roleplay practice sit inside the same workspace rather than requiring a separate tool. According to Synthesia, the underlying reasoning behind the conversational AI avatars draws on large language model technology from OpenAI, while the avatar rendering and voice synthesis remain Synthesia's own proprietary technology.
How the Live Coaching Feature Works
Roleplay Sessions is built around three connected pieces: a conversational AI avatar that acts as the other party in a scenario, a rubric that defines what good performance looks like, and an analytics layer that turns each session into data a manager or L&D team can actually use.
Interactive Avatars That Talk Back
Instead of watching a scripted video, an employee opens a scenario, for example a skeptical prospect during a sales call, and has a live spoken conversation with an AI character built to behave like that persona. One example scenario built into the platform features a character named Marcus, a fellow salesperson who is sympathetic to cold calls but still expects the employee to earn his attention with a clear reason to care. Another persona, Carol, is detail oriented and expects concrete evidence before she'll agree to a follow up meeting. A third, Laura, responds best to genuine listening and relationship building. Each persona is designed to react differently depending on how the employee handles the conversation, which pushes trainees to adapt rather than repeat a memorized script.
Rubric Based Scoring
After each roleplay, the platform scores the employee's performance against a rubric that the organization defines, or that Synthesia's team helps build using the company's existing training materials and internal documentation. This turns a soft skill, like handling objections or delivering constructive feedback, into something that can be measured consistently across an entire team.
Analytics for Managers and L&D Teams
The data from individual sessions rolls up into team and organization level dashboards. Riparbelli described the appeal to executives directly, noting that leadership teams want a clearer picture of how their workforce is actually performing on skills that were previously difficult to measure at scale. A sales leader, for instance, could see how an entire team performs on objection handling before those employees ever get in front of a real customer.
Why Synthesia Is Making This Move Now
The timing lines up with a broader mood shift among enterprise buyers of AI tools. Many companies spent the last couple of years experimenting with generative AI pilots, and a lot of that spending is now under scrutiny. Executives want to see measurable outcomes rather than a novel demo. By adding rubrics, scoring, and analytics on top of its avatar technology, Synthesia is repositioning itself away from being purely a content generation tool and toward being something closer to a performance management platform with a video and voice front end.
There's also a competitive angle. Synthesia's avatar and voice technology is proprietary, but the reasoning layer behind its AI characters relies on outside model providers. Wrapping that technology in a layer of measurement, rubrics, and workforce analytics gives the company a more defensible product than avatar generation alone, which has become increasingly commoditized as more AI video tools enter the market.
Where Organizations Are Using Roleplay Sessions
According to Synthesia, the two most popular use cases so far are sales training and leadership development, both of which lean heavily on soft skills that are notoriously hard to teach through a slide deck or a video alone.
| Use Case | Example Scenario | Skill Being Measured |
|---|---|---|
| Sales enablement | Cold call with a skeptical prospect | Objection handling, framing value |
| Leadership development | Delivering a tough performance review | Clarity, empathy, difficult feedback |
| Customer support | De-escalating an angry customer | Tone, patience, problem resolution |
| Recruiting (planned) | Practice job interviews and candidate screening | Communication, structured responses |
Much of this falls under what L&D professionals call soft skills training, the kind of interpersonal work that is easy to describe in a manual but hard to actually rehearse without a real conversation partner. Roleplay gives employees a low stakes way to practice those exact moments as many times as they need before facing a real customer, client, or direct report.
Early Adopters
Synthesia says it already has a handful of large customers running scaled commercial rollouts of Roleplay Sessions, including what a company spokesperson described as one of the top three companies by market capitalization in Europe, one of the top five companies on the Fortune 100 list, and one of the largest recruitment firms in the world. As with Synthesia's core video product, organizations can either build their own roleplay scenarios directly on the platform or work with Synthesia's internal consulting team to design a program based on the company's existing training documents and internal materials.
Video Training Versus Live Coaching
It's worth breaking down exactly what changes when a training program moves from a one way video into a live, interactive coaching session.
| Traditional AI Video Training | Roleplay Sessions Live Coaching |
|---|---|
| Employee watches passively | Employee actively participates in a live conversation |
| Comprehension checked with quizzes | Performance checked with rubric based scoring |
| Same content for every learner | Conversation adapts based on how the learner responds |
| Limited data beyond completion rates | Detailed analytics on specific skills across a team |
A Crowded but Growing Market
Corporate training is a massive industry, and Synthesia is entering the interactive coaching corner of it at a moment when several other startups are chasing the same idea. The company will face competition from other AI roleplay and coaching tools, and it will also face skepticism from L&D professionals who question whether an AI conversation can ever truly substitute for the unpredictability of a real human interaction. A frustrated customer rarely follows a logical script, and a nervous new manager might freeze in ways a rubric based system isn't built to anticipate.
That skepticism is a fair challenge, and it's one Synthesia will likely have to keep answering with data rather than marketing. Still, the direction of travel among enterprise buyers seems clear enough: companies want AI tools that produce measurable outcomes, not just polished output.
What Organizations Stand to Gain
- Practice without real world risk. Employees can rehearse a difficult conversation as many times as needed before it happens with an actual customer or colleague.
- Consistent, scalable coaching. Every employee gets the same quality of practice partner, regardless of how many managers or trainers a company has available.
- Data managers can actually act on. Instead of a completion checkbox, leaders get a clearer view of where specific skill gaps exist across a team.
- One platform for content and practice. Because Roleplay lives inside Synthesia Studio, training videos and roleplay scenarios don't require separate tools or vendors.
- Lower cost per employee coached. Live human roleplay coaching at scale is expensive and hard to schedule; an always available AI partner removes that bottleneck.
Open Questions and Fair Criticism
Not every part of this shift is settled. Critics point out that AI roleplay partners, however well built, still lack some of the emotional nuance and genuine unpredictability of a real person. Whether practicing with an avatar actually translates into better performance with an actual customer, client, or direct report is the real test, and it's one that will take time and real world results to answer convincingly. There's also the broader question of how comfortable employees will feel being scored by an AI system on interpersonal skills, and how that data gets used inside performance reviews or promotion decisions.
What Comes Next for Synthesia
Roleplay Sessions is currently positioned as an enterprise product, but Synthesia has said it plans to widen access to small businesses, individual professionals, and potentially educational institutions over the coming months as the underlying inference costs continue to drop. The company is also planning to expand the Sessions platform beyond roleplay conversations into other interactive formats, including practice job interviews and candidate screening, extending the same coaching and analytics approach into hiring workflows.
For Synthesia, this represents a shift in identity as much as a product launch. The company built its reputation as an AI avatar and video generation platform. With Sessions, it's positioning itself as something closer to a workforce performance platform, one where the avatar technology is simply the interface for a much bigger bet on measurable, practiced learning.
Final Thoughts
The move from video to live coaching reflects something bigger happening across enterprise AI right now. Companies are less interested in tools that simply look impressive and more interested in tools that can prove they changed an outcome. Synthesia's bet is that the real value in corporate training was never the video itself, but the practice and feedback that comes after it. Whether Roleplay Sessions delivers on that promise at scale is still an open question, but it marks a clear and deliberate next step for a company that built its name on reinventing how training content gets made in the first place.
Related Topics: #AITraining #Synthesia #CorporateLearning #AIAvatars #WorkplaceCoaching #EnterpriseAI #LearningAndDevelopment #FutureOfWork