Synthesia pivots from making training videos to live AI coaching that scores employees in real time

Synthesia's Pivot to AI Coaching Is a Bet That Video Was Never Enough

Synthesia, the British startup that built its business on AI-generated training videos, has launched a product that concedes those videos were never the endpoint. On Wednesday the company introduced Roleplay Sessions, an interactive training tool where employees practice sales pitches, performance reviews, and difficult conversations against AI avatars that push back and score them on a rubric 1. Synthesia describes Roleplay as the first product under a new Sessions platform built for "AI-powered conversations" that help employees "practice critical conversations and get personalized coaching" 2.

The pivot is a strategic admission. Synthesia cites a meta-analysis from Rice University covering 300-plus peer-reviewed studies that identifies three elements of effective learning: inform, demonstrate, and practice 2. The company's own framing is blunt. "Most enterprise training nails the first two, but practice at scale is where it breaks down" 2. Watching a video is better than reading a document. Practicing the skill with feedback is better than either. And the company selling the videos is the one saying so.

CEO Victor Riparbelli made the case without hedging. Video outperforms text, he told TechCrunch, but for most skills people learn best by doing 1. The CEO of an AI video company telling you video has limits is not a slip of the tongue. It is the commercial logic behind the entire product.

Here is that logic. Synthesia's avatar and voice technology is proprietary, but the reasoning intelligence powering it comes from OpenAI 1. The generation layer is partly rented. What no competitor can replicate from outside is the data layer: rubric scores, behavioral analytics, granular metrics on how well a sales force actually communicates. By adding scoring and measurement, Synthesia is repositioning from an avatar company into a performance-management platform with a video interface 1.

Riparbelli confirmed where the emphasis now sits. Executives want to "map out the talent in their company" using data from AI role-play practice, he said, giving them workforce insight that has been "really difficult to do before" 1.

The pilot results are designed to close the sale. At a Fortune 10 company, Synthesia reports that learners saw soft skill scores improve by over 110 percent and technical acumen by over 80 percent within weeks, with nearly 70 percent of users returning voluntarily to practice again 2. A company spokesperson told TechCrunch that scaled commercial rollouts are underway at "one of the top three companies by market cap in Europe, one of the top five Fortune 100, and one of the biggest recruitment companies in the world" 1. The most common use cases are sales training and leadership development, much of it focused on soft skills 1.

The roadmap extends well beyond training departments. Roleplay is the first release under the broader Sessions platform, and Synthesia plans to expand into job interviews and candidate screening 1. The product already integrates with HR systems including Workday, BambooHR, and HiBob, and exports directly into learning management platforms 2. When a performance-scoring platform connects to your HRIS and moves into hiring, it stops being a training tool and becomes evaluation infrastructure.

When an AI avatar scores an employee on empathy, persuasiveness, or conflict resolution, who owns that data? The employer paid for the platform. Synthesia builds the rubric and aggregates the scores. If Sessions extends into candidate screening, those scores could follow job applicants in ways the applicant never authorized.

Synthesia plans to expand Roleplay beyond enterprises to small businesses, prosumers, and educational institutions as inference costs fall 1. At that scale, the population being scored grows from corporate workforces to students practicing interviews before they have entered the job market.

Fortune 100 employees are being graded on soft skills by AI avatars today, and nobody has said who controls those scores. As Synthesia pushes into candidate screening and the consumer market, that question gets harder to defer.