Synthesia’s new AI roleplay bot grades your sales pitch, not just your video

Synthesia is pivoting from being the company that makes AI avatars for training videos to one that can prove those videos actually changed your employees’ behavior. On Wednesday, the British startup launched Roleplay Sessions, a new interactive platform where workers practice high-stakes conversations—think sales calls, performance reviews, or irate customer complaints—with an AI avatar that talks back, pushes back, and then scores them against a rubric.

“Video performs way better than text or sending out a document,” 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.” The logic is blunt: most corporate training, including Synthesia’s own core video product, informs and demonstrates but stops short of changing behavior. A meta-analysis of learning research backs him up. Real learning requires doing and getting feedback, not just watching.

This isn’t just a feature add. Roleplay is the first release under a broader “Sessions” platform the company plans to expand into job interviews and candidate screening. It also gives Synthesia a more defensible business. The avatars and voice tech are proprietary, sure, but the reasoning brains are OpenAI’s. The real lock-in comes from the analytics layer on top—the rubrics, performance data, and granular talent mapping that a managerial class hungry for metrics will find hard to quit. Riparbelli says you can now get very specific data on how your entire sales force is performing, something that’s been painfully difficult to do before.

Early adopters include one of Europe’s top three companies by market cap, a Fortune 100 giant, and a major global recruitment firm. For now, Roleplay is an enterprise play, but Synthesia plans to push it downmarket to small businesses and schools within months as inference costs drop. The bet is that the next phase of enterprise AI won’t be won by flashy demos, but by a boring, beautiful proof of ROI.