British AI startup Synthesia has launched Roleplay Sessions, a product that lets employees practise high-stakes conversations, such as sales pitches, performance reviews and handling complaints, with an AI avatar that responds, pushes back and scores their performance against a rubric. The launch, announced on Wednesday, marks a shift for the company beyond its original business of generating AI training videos, reflecting a bet that enterprises now want proof their AI investments actually change behaviour rather than just polished content.

Roleplay is the first product under a wider "Sessions" platform that Synthesia plans to extend into areas such as job interviews and candidate screening. The company already has large-scale customers including a top-three European firm by market capitalisation, a top-five Fortune 100 company and a major global recruitment firm, with sales and leadership training the most popular uses so far. While Synthesia's avatar and voice technology remain proprietary, the underlying reasoning is powered by OpenAI, and the addition of analytics and performance data is intended to position the firm as a broader performance-management platform rather than just a video generator. The product is enterprise-only for now, but Synthesia aims to expand it to small businesses, individual users and potentially education as AI inference costs fall.