Harvard Clones Professors for $699 Bootcamp
Harvard Business School uses faculty avatars to coach founders in a $699, week program, Georgia Tech’s Jill Watson AI tutor raises student success rates.
Harvard Business School launched HBS Foundry, an eight-week, $699 bootcamp that lets founders rehearse pitches, sales calls and board meetings against AI versions of Harvard instructors. Seven faculty members, including senior lecturer Jeff Bussgang, volunteered to be cloned. The avatars were built with HeyGen, a video-AI startup. Since the program opened in April, 760 founders have completed it, according to a Harvard spokesperson cited by Fortune.
Founders can spend up to 10 hours with a single avatar in a single stretch, a figure reported by faculty co-chair Tom Eisenmann. The avatars were intentionally designed to push back on weak ideas rather than simply agree, according to IBTimes UK. Bussgang said, “My students love it.” A founder who raised more than $1 million, Dragana Savic of INIA Biosciences, said practicing on the avatars was worth it before facing a real investor.
New York Times reporter Sarah Kessler tested the system by pitching Bussgang’s avatar an “Uber for bananas.” Both Bussgang and his AI double were unconvinced, and Kessler noted the avatar gave itself away with a fixed, unmoving smile, as reported by TechCrunch.
Shikhar Ghosh, one of the faculty whose likeness was cloned, told Fortune that the avatars were never meant to replace him. “The goal isn’t to create a substitute for me,” he said.
Georgia Tech’s AI Tutor
Georgia Tech has run an AI teaching assistant called Jill Watson since 2016. The tool, built on IBM’s Watson platform, answered student questions on class discussion forums so accurately that early students did not realize she was not human. Students who had access to Jill Watson earned more A grades than those who did not, 66% compared with 62%, and fewer C grades, 3% compared with 7%, according to Georgia Tech’s Design Intelligence Laboratory. The tool answered student questions correctly 78.7% of the time in that course, well ahead of a general AI assistant that got it right only 30.7% of the time.
| Metric | Georgia Tech Jill Watson | General AI Assistant |
|---|---|---|
| A-grade rate | 66% | 62% |
| C-grade rate | 3% | 7% |
| Accuracy | 78.7% | 30.7% |
The tool provides immediate answers instead of waiting for office hours, a feature that mirrors how Harvard founders use their AI faculty avatars.
Broader Implications
More than 100 universities across all 50 states have tested Foundry with their own students and entrepreneurs, Harvard said. The reach raises questions about how much teaching could eventually move from a classroom to software. David Joyner, Georgia Tech’s interim vice provost for AI in education, told Fortune that Harvard’s relatively low price point compared with its more than $84,000 annual business-school tuition is part of a broader push to make higher education more accessible, but stressed that the role of the professors themselves remains “key” to making the avatars work.
The program’s cost, the number of founders trained, and the time spent with avatars are listed in the program’s fixtures. Performance data for Georgia Tech’s AI tutor can be found in the university’s stats.
