Universities Are Cloning Their Professors With AI
At first glance, Harvard Business School senior lecturer Jeff Bussgang looks ordinary on a video call, smiling, ready to hear a founder’s pitch. He isn’t there. The student is talking to an artificial intelligence avatar built from Bussgang’s likeness, one of seven Harvard faculty who volunteered to be cloned, Entrepreneur reported.
The avatars power HBS Foundry, an eight-week, $699 bootcamp where founders rehearse pitches, sales calls and board meetings against AI versions of Harvard instructors before facing the real thing. Harvard built the avatars with HeyGen, a video AI startup, and 760 founders have gone through the program since it opened in April, according to a Harvard spokesperson, Fortune reported.
New York Times reporter Sarah Kessler tested the system herself, pitching Bussgang’s avatar a deliberately weak idea, an “Uber for bananas.” Both the real Bussgang and his AI double were unconvinced, though Kessler noted the avatar gave itself away with a fixed, unmoving smile, TechCrunch reported.
Founders have spent up to 10 hours at a stretch with a single avatar, according to faculty co-chair Tom Eisenmann, who said the avatars were deliberately built to push back on a weak idea rather than simply agree with it, IBTimes UK reported. “My students love it,” Bussgang said.
Dragana Savic, a founder who raised more than $1 million for her company, INIA Biosciences, said practicing on the avatars was worth it before she faced a real investor, according to the same IBTimes UK report.
Georgia Tech’s AI Tutor Already Has a Track Record
Harvard is not the only school scaling faculty through AI, and it is not the first. Imperial Business School has built digital twins of its own staff, and Georgia Tech has run an AI teaching assistant called Jill Watson since 2016, IBTimes UK reported. Jill Watson began as a simpler system built on IBM’s Watson platform, answering student questions on class discussion forums so accurately that students in an early course did not realize she wasn’t human, according to Georgia Tech’s announcement.
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Georgia Tech students use Jill Watson the same way Harvard founders use their AI faculty avatars, asking real, specific questions and getting an answer back immediately instead of waiting for office hours or a forum reply from a human. In one course, students who had access to Jill Watson earned more A grades than students who didn’t, 66% compared with 62%, and fewer C grades, 3% compared with 7%, Georgia Tech’s Design Intelligence Laboratory found. The tool answered student questions correctly 78.7% of the time in that same course, well ahead of a general AI assistant given the same material, which got it right only 30.7% of the time.
With Foundry, a founder can test an idea against an AI avatar as many times as it takes before walking into a real meeting better prepared, a form of unlimited repetition no single professor, however dedicated, could offer in office hours alone, Startup Fortune reported.
Shikhar Ghosh, one of the faculty members whose likeness was cloned, told Fortune the avatars were never meant to replace him. “The goal isn’t to create a substitute for me,” he said.
More Than 100 Universities Are Already Testing the Same Tools
More than 100 universities across all 50 states have tested Foundry with their own students and entrepreneurs, Harvard said. That reach raises the real question sitting underneath the novelty of talking to a professor’s AI clone: If founders and students are willing to learn from an AI version of an instructor, and early research suggests it can genuinely improve outcomes, how much of teaching itself could eventually move from a classroom to software?
The tension is not lost on the people building it. Scaling faculty through AI raises an awkward question for any university charging tuition built around access to expert instructors: At what point does efficiency start to undermine what a student believes they’re paying for?
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.
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