For the better part of a decade, London-based AI company Synthesia built its business around a straightforward value proposition: help large organizations produce interactive training videos quickly and at a fraction of the cost of traditional corporate learning content. Its latest product, however, signals a meaningful shift in strategy - one that moves the company away from simply generating content and toward demonstrating that the content actually changes behavior.
On Wednesday, Synthesia officially unveiled a product called Roleplay Sessions, a live interactive training tool that places employees in simulated high-pressure conversations. Using an AI-powered avatar, workers can rehearse scenarios such as sales presentations, performance review discussions, and handling difficult customer complaints. The avatar does not just listen - it responds, challenges the user, and then evaluates their performance against a predefined set of criteria.
Roleplay Sessions marks the first release under a broader product umbrella the company is calling the "Sessions" platform. Synthesia intends to extend this platform into additional formats over time, including tools designed for job interview preparation and candidate screening processes.
Addressing the Gap Between Training and Behavior Change
The timing of this launch is deliberate. Enterprises across industries are becoming increasingly scrutinous about the return on their AI-related investments, and Synthesia is leaning into that pressure rather than avoiding it. The company has pointed to a meta-analysis of learning research to make the case that the majority of corporate training programs - including, by its own implicit admission, its core video product - fall short when it comes to genuinely changing how employees act on the job. Most training programs inform and illustrate, but the research suggests that lasting behavioral change comes from active practice combined with real feedback.
"Video performs way better than text or sending out a document," said Victor Riparbelli, CEO and co-founder of Synthesia. "But for most things, we learn the best by actually practicing something rather than just reading it."
This philosophy underpins the entire Roleplay Sessions concept. Rather than watching a video about how to handle a difficult customer, an employee using the platform is placed directly into a simulated version of that conversation and must navigate it in real time.
A More Defensible Market Position
Beyond the pedagogical rationale, the new product also serves a clear competitive purpose. Synthesia's avatar and voice synthesis technology are proprietary, but the core reasoning intelligence powering its products is built on technology from OpenAI. That dependency creates an inherent vulnerability in a market where multiple companies can access the same underlying AI capabilities.
By building a layer of rubrics, structured performance data, and analytics on top of its avatar technology, Synthesia is working to reposition itself. Rather than being seen primarily as an AI avatar company, it is aiming to be recognized as a performance management and workforce development platform - one that happens to use video and avatars as its primary interface.
"From a managerial executive layer, we're seeing huge interest in mapping out the talent in their company in a way that's been really difficult to do before," Riparbelli said. "If you have your entire sales team practice with an AI role player, you can get very granular data on how your sales force is doing overall."
That kind of aggregated, structured performance data is something traditional training methods have rarely been able to provide at scale. A manager overseeing dozens of sales representatives cannot personally observe every pitch or coaching conversation, but a platform that logs and scores every simulated interaction could give leadership a far clearer picture of where skill gaps exist across an entire team.
Early Adopters and Use Cases
Synthesia has already secured a number of enterprise customers who have moved beyond pilots and into scaled commercial rollouts of the Roleplay product. According to a company spokesperson, early adopters include one of the three largest companies by market capitalization in Europe, one of the top five members of the Fortune 100, and one of the world's largest recruitment organizations. The company declined to name these clients specifically.
The two most common applications so far center on sales team training and leadership development. Practical examples include practicing how to present and sell a product, as well as how to navigate sensitive or difficult internal conversations. Riparbelli noted that much of the demand is concentrated around soft skills - the kind of interpersonal competencies that are notoriously hard to teach through static content.
As with Synthesia's existing video platform, enterprise clients have two primary options for deploying Roleplay Sessions. They can build their own training programs directly on the platform, or they can work with Synthesia's in-house consultants to develop a customized solution. The latter approach draws on whatever existing training documentation, internal guidelines, and contextual materials a company already has on hand, allowing the AI-driven scenarios to reflect the specific language, processes, and culture of that organization.
Broader Availability on the Horizon
For now, Roleplay Sessions is positioned exclusively as an enterprise product, but that scope is expected to widen. Riparbelli indicated that the company plans to make the tool available to small businesses, prosumers, and potentially educational institutions within the coming months. The ability to broaden access at lower price points is tied closely to the ongoing decline in AI inference costs, which has been making computationally intensive applications progressively more affordable to deliver at scale.
Riparbelli framed products like Roleplay Sessions as representative of where enterprise AI adoption is heading more broadly. In his view, the market is maturing past the point where organizations are impressed by polished demonstrations or headline-grabbing capabilities. What companies increasingly want to see is evidence that an AI investment translates into measurable improvements in business outcomes - whether that means higher sales conversion rates, better-prepared managers, or more consistent customer service interactions.
That shift in enterprise expectations may prove to be as significant as any individual product launch. As the novelty of generative AI fades, the companies that survive and grow in the enterprise space will likely be those that can point to concrete, quantifiable results rather than compelling demos. With Roleplay Sessions, Synthesia is making a direct bet on that outcome-driven future.
