Harvard Uses 7 AI Faculty Avatars in a $699 Founder Bootcamp, While Keeping Live Advice Human

Harvard Business School is putting AI versions of seven volunteer faculty members into an eight-week, $699 founder bootcamp. The HBS Foundry program lets participants rehearse difficult startup conversations repeatedly, but it is not an HBS degree program and offers no academic credit.

Practice before the consequential conversation

Foundry is Harvard Business School’s AI-native digital workspace for entrepreneurs. In the bootcamp, founders can use the faculty avatars again and again to rehearse investor pitches, sales calls, and board meetings, including a pitch before taking it into a real meeting.

Kat Rings, Foundry’s director, said founders had asked for a place to practice and be challenged before meeting mentors and investors. The product’s core proposition is therefore repetition: a founder can retry a conversation without consuming scarce live-adviser time.

The bootcamp also includes live sessions with experts and culminates in an opportunity to pitch investors for $100,000. That structure makes the avatars a preparation tool rather than the program’s final authority on a founder’s company or decisions.

The represented professors remain involved

The seven participating professors and senior lecturers volunteered for the project. They took part in interviews and recording sessions, testing, and ongoing feedback; their areas include venture capital, business-model design, board dynamics, and startup strategy.

That involvement is central to how HBS frames the system. Participating professor Shikhar Ghosh said its purpose is not to substitute for him, but to help founders arrive more prepared so live time can concentrate on questions that need human judgment and conversation.

A wider audience, without the credential

Harvard said 760 founders have participated so far. A Harvard spokesperson described Foundry’s aim as extending entrepreneurial support to high-potential founders wherever they are, including people who may never study at Harvard or have access to a major innovation ecosystem’s networks and resources.

The distinction between support and education is explicit. The bootcamp is priced far below HBS’s annual tuition of more than $84,000, according to the account, but it does not confer a degree or credit. Its value proposition is access to structured practice and faculty-modeled feedback, not entry into HBS’s academic program.

Professor avatars are becoming a test of representation

Harvard is joining an existing set of university experiments rather than inventing the category. Georgia Tech previously made DAI-vid, an AI avatar of professor David Joyner, for an online generative AI course on edX; Imperial Business School has created digital twins of professors, and Georgia Tech has used its Jill Watson AI teaching assistant in large online classes.

Joyner said close collaboration with the represented person is necessary: without it, a university or company cannot know whether the experience faithfully represents that faculty member. HBS’s interviews, recordings, testing, and continuing feedback address that concern procedurally, though they do not turn the avatar into the professor.

Stanford lecturer Kian Katanforoosh drew the remaining limit more sharply. AI can answer unlimited repeated questions and explain ideas in different ways, he said, but it cannot fully know a student as a person, put its own reputation at stake, or genuinely care what happens next. For Foundry, that leaves the live encounter as the part the avatars are designed to improve, not replace.