For years, Synthesia's main selling point was using artificial intelligence to help businesses quickly produce interactive training videos at a fraction of the usual cost for corporate educational materials. But the startup's latest offering takes a different approach—suggesting that the true competitive advantage in enterprise AI lies not just in generating content, but in demonstrating its effectiveness.

On Wednesday, the British company unveiled Roleplay Sessions, an interactive training tool where employees can rehearse high-pressure conversations such as sales pitches, performance evaluations, or handling customer complaints. In these sessions, an AI avatar responds, challenges the user, and then scores their performance against a predefined rubric. This launch arrives as companies increasingly scrutinize whether their investments in AI are yielding real returns.

Citing a meta-analysis of learning research, Synthesia argues that most corporate training—including, by implication, its own core video product—fails to actually change behavior. Training programs typically inform and demonstrate, but genuine learning happens when someone actively practices a skill and receives feedback. "For most things, we learn the best by actually practicing something rather than just reading it," the company notes.

Roleplay also strengthens Synthesia's market position. While the company's avatar and voice technologies are proprietary, the underlying reasoning intelligence comes from OpenAI. By adding layers that include rubrics, performance data, and analytics, Synthesia is repositioning itself less as an AI avatar company and more as a performance-management platform with a video interface. "From a managerial executive layer, we're seeing huge interest in mapping out the talent in their company in a way that's been really difficult to do before," said Riparbelli. "If you have your entire sales team practice with an AI role player, you can get very granular data on how your sales force is doing overall."

Synthesia already has several early Roleplay customers with scaled commercial deployments, including "one of the top three companies by market cap in Europe, one of the top five Fortune 100, and one of the biggest recruitment companies in the world," according to a company spokesperson. The two most popular use cases involve training sales teams and leadership—programs focused on practicing product pitches or navigating difficult conversations. Much of this revolves around soft skills training, Riparbelli noted.

As with Synthesia's main product, customers can either create their own training programs on the platform or enlist the company's consultants to build a customized solution that leverages existing training documents and context. Roleplay is currently an enterprise offering, but the goal is to make it available to small businesses, prosumers, and potentially educational institutions in the coming months as inference costs continue to drop. Riparbelli believes products like Roleplay represent the next phase of enterprise AI adoption, where companies care less about whether AI looks impressive in a social media demo and more about whether it delivers measurable business results.