British AI company Synthesia launched Roleplay Sessions in July 2026, an interactive enterprise training product that lets employees practice high-stakes workplace conversations with AI avatars. The avatars respond in real time, push back on responses, and score participants against a rubric — generating performance data and analytics for managers.
Roleplay Sessions is designed for scenarios such as sales pitches, performance reviews, and customer complaint handling. It is the first product under a broader “Sessions” platform Synthesia plans to expand into additional formats, including job interviews and candidate screening.
The launch marks a shift in strategy for Synthesia, which built its business on AI-generated corporate training videos. CEO and co-founder Victor Riparbelli said the move reflects a fundamental limit of passive learning. “Video performs way better than text or sending out a document,” he told TechCrunch. “But for most things, we learn the best by actually practicing something rather than just reading it.”
Synthesia cited a meta-analysis of learning research to argue that most corporate training — including its own video product — informs and demonstrates but falls short of changing behavior. Roleplay Sessions is positioned as a response to that gap.
The product also repositions Synthesia competitively. While its avatar and voice technology are proprietary, the underlying reasoning intelligence is built on OpenAI’s models. By adding rubrics, performance analytics, and talent-mapping capabilities, the company is moving toward what Riparbelli described as a performance-management platform. “If you have your entire sales team practice with an AI role player, you can get very granular data on how your sales force is doing overall,” he said.
Synthesia said early customers already using Roleplay at scale include one of Europe’s top three companies by market cap, a top-five Fortune 100 company, and one of the world’s largest recruitment firms. The most common use cases are sales training and leadership development, particularly soft skills.
Roleplay Sessions is currently an enterprise-only offering. Synthesia said it plans to expand access to small businesses, prosumers, and potentially educational institutions within the next few months as inference costs decline.
Source: TechCrunch