British artificial intelligence startup Synthesia has launched an interactive training platform designed to help companies measure whether they are actually improving the skills of their employees, expanding beyond AI-generated corporate videos and marking a shift towards performance management.
The company on Wednesday announced Role Play Sessions, an AI-powered training product that allows employees to simulate real-world workplace conversations with AI avatars that can dynamically respond, challenge users, and evaluate performance against predefined metrics.
The launch is Synthesia’s first product under its broader Sessions platform, which the company plans to expand into additional enterprise applications such as job interviews and candidate screening, according to TechCrunch.
This move follows broader changes in the enterprise AI market, with customers now seeking tangible returns from their AI investments, rather than simply adopting generative AI tools to improve productivity.
Synthesia built its business by allowing companies to create training videos using AI-generated avatars, significantly reducing the cost and time required to create corporate learning materials.
But CEO and co-founder Victor Ripalberg said the company believes creating training content alone is not enough if companies can’t determine whether employees have actually learned new skills.
“Video performs much better than sending text or documents,” Riparbelli told TechCrunch. “But most things are best learned by doing them, not just reading about them.”
The company cited research suggesting that while educational videos improve knowledge transfer, behavior change is more effectively achieved through repeated practice combined with immediate feedback.
Role-play sessions are designed around this principle, allowing employees to participate in mock conversations covering scenarios such as sales presentations, customer complaints, performance reviews, and difficult workplace discussions. Rather than simply viewing instructional content, users receive real-time responses from an AI avatar before being evaluated against a company-defined rubric.
This new offering also represents a repositioning of Synthesia as generative AI technologies become increasingly commoditized. While the company continues to rely on its proprietary avatar and speech generation technology, the inference capabilities behind the conversations are powered by OpenAI’s large-scale language models.
Synthesia differentiates itself from general-purpose AI assistant companies by layering company-specific assessment tools, analytics, and performance scoring on top of its underlying model.
“There’s a lot of interest from executives in planning their internal talent in ways that have been very difficult to do in the past,” Lipalveli said.
“If you have your entire sales team practice with an AI role player, you can get very detailed data about the performance of your entire sales team.”
Enterprise software vendors are increasingly looking to build their own workflows and datasets around third-party AI models, rather than competing solely on model capabilities.
Synthesia says several large organizations have already begun commercial deployment of the platform. The company said its early customers include one of Europe’s three largest publicly traded companies by market capitalization, one of the five largest Fortune 100 companies, and one of the world’s largest recruitment agencies.
The most common applications include sales enablement and leadership development, where employees can repeatedly practice customer interactions, negotiations, and management conversations before engaging with customers or co-workers. Organizations can build their own role-play scenarios using existing company documents and training materials, or work with Synthesia’s consulting team to develop training programs customized to their business needs.
The announcement comes as companies increasingly scrutinize their enterprise AI spending following an initial wave of excitement around generative AI. After two years of rapid experimentation with AI assistants and content generation tools, many enterprise technology leaders are shifting their focus to measurable business outcomes, increased productivity, and employee performance.
This evolution is reshaping enterprise AI priorities. Rather than evaluating AI based on its ability to generate text, images, and video, organizations are now looking for platforms that can demonstrate improvements in employee productivity, sales efficiency, and operational performance.
For AI vendors, this creates an opportunity to move beyond providing standalone generative AI capabilities and integrate into broader enterprise workflows.
Roleplay Sessions was initially targeted at large enterprise customers, but as AI inference costs continue to fall, Synthesia plans to expand the platform to small and medium-sized businesses, individual professionals, and educational institutions in the coming months. The company expects its broader session platform to evolve beyond employee training into areas such as recruiting, candidate assessment, and other interactive business workflows that combine conversational AI with structured performance evaluations.
