For years, Synthesia's signature has been using AI to create interactive training videos for businesses in minutes, at a fraction of the cost of traditional corporate learning materials. Now, this UK startup is betting on another angle: perhaps the real moat for enterprise AI lies not in content generation, but in proving "it actually works."

On Wednesday, Synthesia launched Roleplay Sessions, an interactive training product. Employees can practice high-stakes conversations—such as sales pitches, performance reviews, and customer complaints—with an AI avatar that talks back, argues, and finally gives you a score based on a rating scale. This is the first product under Synthesia's broader "Sessions" platform, which, according to exclusive information from TechCrunch, will expand to other forms such as interviews and candidate screening.

This move comes at a time when companies are re-evaluating whether AI spending is worth it. Synthesia cites a meta-analysis of learning studies showing that most corporate training—including its core video product—often stops at "changing behavior": they excel at informing and demonstrating, but the real push into learning comes from doing it yourself, plus feedback. "Videos are way better than just text or sending a document," said CEO and co-founder Viktor Heston to TechCrunch, "but for most things, our best way to learn isn't reading—it's actually practicing."

Roleplay also positions Synthesia more securely. The company's avatars and voice technology are self-developed, but the underlying reasoning intelligence comes from OpenAI. Once layered with rating scales, performance data, and analytics, Synthesia becomes more like a performance management platform with a video facade, rather than just an AI avatar company. "From a leadership perspective, we see strong interest—before it was hard to understand the distribution of talent in the company, now it's possible," said Heston, "if you have your entire sales team practice with AI characters, you can get very granular data on how the team performs overall."

Synthesia already has several early Roleplay clients who have scaled commercial deployments, including "one of the top three most valuable companies in Europe, one of the top five in the Fortune 100, and one of the largest recruitment companies in the world." The two most popular scenarios right now are sales teams and leadership training—such as how to sell a product or handle a difficult conversation, Heston said, with a lot being soft skills training. Like its main product, customers can build their own training programs on the platform, or ask Synthesia's consultants to set up a customized solution, partly relying on the company's existing training documents and background.

Roleplay is currently an enterprise product, but the goal is to make it more widely available to small businesses, professionals, and possibly educational institutions in the coming months, as reasoning costs continue to drop. Heston believes that products like Roleplay represent the next phase of enterprise AI implementation: companies are no longer so concerned about how AI looks in social media demos, but rather whether it can produce measurable business results.