Harvard Business School is piloting an eight-week entrepreneurship boot camp called H.B.S. Foundry, priced at $699. The program utilizes AI-generated video avatars of instructors to run pitch simulations and board meeting drills. After testing with over 100 universities across 50 states, the school aims to scale its educational offerings far beyond the 900 students admitted to its MBA program annually.

Faculty co-chair Bussgang and project director Rings helped engineer the system. They trained the AI agents on specific professor materials but deliberately programmed them to avoid typical large language model obsequiousness. Instead, the agents mirror HBS’s rigorous forced-curve grading, often rejecting startup ideas on the first attempt to push participants through iterative refinement.

Developed alongside avatar creator Hey Gen, the platform blends live weekly sessions with a virtual workspace of peers and AI tools. The integration of instructor likenesses into chatbots and video calls has unexpectedly surged engagement. This initiative serves as a broader case study, reflecting how consulting firms and media producers are similarly deploying AI to stretch professional bandwidth.