Harvard Business School is testing something that would have sounded absurd five years ago: paying students $699 to get judged by a pixelated venture capitalist. The school’s HBS Foundry bootcamp now uses AI avatars built by HeyGen to give entrepreneurs feedback during practice pitches and board meetings. One of those avatars is a digital replica of Jeff Bussgang, co-founder of Flybridge Capital, and New York Times reporter Sarah Kessler put it through its paces by pitching something called “Uber for bananas.”
The results were mixed, which feels about right for this technology. Kessler reported that both the real Bussgang and his simulated counterpart rejected the banana logistics idea, but the avatar version delivered the bad news with what she described as a noticeably frozen smile. That uncanny valley detail captures the current state of AI instruction: competent enough to be useful, awkward enough to remind you it’s not human.
Project director Katharina Rings originally envisioned the AI component as a straightforward chatbot. But after HBS released a trial version, students pushed back. They didn’t want to type questions into a box. They wanted something that felt more like a guided experience, which led to the avatar approach. That’s a telling shift — students are now shaping how AI gets deployed in their own education, and they’re asking for more human-looking interfaces, not fewer.
Bussgang himself admits the whole thing is a little “creepy,” but he’s not exactly losing sleep over it. “My students love it,” he said. That tension between instructor discomfort and student enthusiasm mirrors what’s playing out across higher education. The difference here is that Harvard is monetizing it directly through a bootcamp rather than burying the experiment in a research paper. Whether AI avatars become a standard feature of executive education or a novelty that fades once the novelty wears off depends on whether the feedback is actually good. Kessler’s banana pitch didn’t get funded, but at least she got a clear answer — even if it came with a frozen smile.
