Harvard Business School made news this summer for a new $699 online entrepreneurship program, called H.B.S. Foundry, that lets founders pitch their ideas to AI-generated avatars of Harvard faculty and practice board meetings and sales calls with instructors who are never actually in the room.
At Gies College of Business, that idea isn't a headline. It's been standard practice for four years.
About a dozen Gies Business faculty currently have avatars – either voice clones or full video doubles. When one of those professors needs to update a recorded lecture, they no longer need to book a studio or clear an afternoon to re-record. They edit a script, save it, and wait. Moments later, a video appears with their voice and likeness, delivering faculty-authored material they never sat down to record.
The training process itself is simple. A faculty member sits for a one-time, 30-minute studio session that captures both appearance and voice. From that recording, the Gies digital media team can generate a realistic avatar able to present the instructor's course content in multiple languages.
Faculty who have adopted AI avatars find that the technology is able to extend their reach, relevance and impact, while also protecting their time.
Four years after Gies began experimenting with AI avatars of its faculty, the College has a real-world example of what it looks like when people and AI work together – and, more importantly, the benefits it opens up for students.
What It Means for Students
The clearest benefit of digital avatars is the possibility of improved learning and engagement. To assess learning outcomes, Gies has run informal surveys and knowledge checks with staff, faculty, College leadership, and teaching assistants to gauge how "watchable" avatar-led lecture videos are and how well they support student success. Viewers answered assessment questions correctly at similar rates regardless of whether they'd watched an avatar or a traditional studio recording – and in some cases, avatar viewers outperformed studio ones.
And avatars keep courses current. In fields like AI, data analytics, tax and finance, material can change fast, sometimes within a single semester. A traditional lecture video requires booking a studio, setting up equipment and asking a faculty member to clear part of a day – a process that can significantly delay updates. An avatar shrinks that process to roughly the time it takes to revise a script.
Robert Brunner, Gies Business’ Chief Disruption Officer, has used the technology to rebuild lecture content for his emerging technology course rather than wait for the next scheduled overhaul. For students studying a fast-moving subject, that means a better chance of learning what matters now, not what mattered when the video happened to be recorded.
Gies' online programs, which enroll thousands of working professionals across time zones, serve students whose lives don't fit neatly into a traditional class schedule. An avatar can help a student at 2 a.m. as easily as 2 p.m., without requiring the instructor to be in front of a camera at either hour.
To serve this purpose, Gies is now testing two types of interactive avatars. An avatar of Professor Aric Rindfleisch is trained on the material from his two online digital marketing courses and will be able to respond to individual student questions, by voice or text, about that material.
Another avatar currently being built for Professor Doug Hannah will help students in his iDegree entrepreneurship course practice customer-discovery conversations. This avatar is a stock video persona that acts as an interviewee with a tunable personality so that students can practice conducting customer discovery interviews. Students can move through a progression of difficulty (text, voice, then video) to practice interview skills and then receive quantitative and qualitative feedback on their performance, as well as coaching and suggestions for improvement. The platform will allow students to receive individualized coaching and will allow instructors to track student progress over time. It's a way to practice a high-stakes conversation, at scale, before it counts.
While those interactive avatars are still being tested, the College has already rolled out AI-powered chatbots. A student stuck on a concept late at night can get help immediately, with responses drawn from a library the instructor built, instead of waiting for the next office hours.
Since an avatar's voice and lip movements can be regenerated from a new script, the same lecture can exist in multiple languages without the instructor speaking a word of any of them. Brunner has demonstrated the technology can render his material in Spanish, French and Mandarin.
"It took only a couple of minutes for it to have me speaking Spanish," he told Poets&Quants in 2023. "We will do it in French and Mandarin, and it was easy peasy."
Another improvement is the one easiest to overlook: what professors do with the time they get back. Every hour a faculty member doesn't spend re-recording a lecture or answering routine questions is an hour that can go toward advising students, conducting research, and focusing on individual interactions AI can't replicate. Dean Brooke Elliott has made that central to her case for the technology, writing in Crain's Chicago Business that AI's value lies in letting experts "focus on the work that creates the greatest value."
For students, that distinction matters. Gies Business is using AI to enhance the learning experience – where it makes sense – so people can spend more time on the work where human expertise, critical thinking and judgment matter most.
The Rules Behind the Technology
In what’s believed to be a first-of-its-kind innovation, the College developed one of the first formal agreements between an institution and its faculty governing avatar rights. Every faculty member with an avatar signs a memorandum of understanding, or MOU, establishing their control over the creation and use of AI-generated avatars based on their appearance and voice. The agreement grants faculty several protections:
- Faculty provide consent before an avatar is created or used.
- Faculty retain the intellectual property associated with their course content.
- Faculty review and approve avatar-generated recorded material before publication.
- Faculty may cancel their avatar's use at any time.
The MOU functions as a written authorization framework. It defines the College's permitted use of a faculty member's recorded likeness and voice, and it creates an approval process for new scripts, translations, revisions and other recorded avatar appearances.
What's Next?
The interactive avatar Brunner built in 2025 and second-generation innovations from Rindfleisch and Hannah signal what may soon be possible at scale in education: always-on office hours. A student asks a question, and an avatar grounded in that professor's course material responds, day or night. The technology is still imperfect, but it's improving quickly.
Faster, better avatars aren't really the end goal, though. The bigger experiment underway at Gies is figuring out how people and AI can work together in ways that make education more current, more accessible and more valuable – without giving up the human judgment and relationships that make learning matter in the first place.
A professor's time is finite. An avatar's availability isn't. For a student learning a fast-moving subject on their own schedule, in their own language and in an engaging format, that combination can be powerful.