Synthesia's new Roleplay Sessions product is not another AI video shortcut. It is a bet that companies will pay more for proof that employees can actually handle the conversation after the training ends.
Synthesia has spent years selling companies a faster way to make training videos. Now it wants to sell them the harder thing: practice. According to TechCrunch, the British startup launched Roleplay Sessions on Wednesday, July 22, giving employees live conversations with AI avatars that push back, ask follow-ups, and score the session when it ends.
That is the bet. A sales rep can run through a difficult pitch. A manager can practise a performance review. A support agent can handle a frustrated customer before a real customer is on the line. The avatar talks back, and the employee has to respond in the moment. Watching a training module and holding your ground in a live exchange are not the same skill.
The product worked. Synthesia built its base by helping large companies turn scripts, slide decks, and training documents into avatar-led videos without a production crew. TechCrunch reported in January that Bosch, Merck, and SAP were among its enterprise customers, and a GV interview with CEO Victor Riparbelli said the company works with 90% of the Fortune 100. That kind of customer list gives Synthesia room to try something bigger than faster content.
The numbers explain why it can take the swing. TechCrunch reported that Synthesia raised a $200 million Series E in January 2026 at a $4 billion valuation, up from $2.1 billion a year earlier. It also reported that the company crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue in April 2025. For an AI company, that is not a small detail. Revenue gives this story more weight than a product demo with a shiny avatar on screen.
The harder sell is proof
Roleplay Sessions sits under a new Synthesia platform called Sessions, TechCrunch reported, and it changes the procurement conversation. A learning team can already say an employee watched a video. What it usually cannot say is whether that employee improved after five practice runs, or whether one team is still failing the same objection across a sales script. Roleplay Sessions is designed to produce that evidence through scores, skill breakdowns, transcripts, and manager analytics.
That matters. Corporate training is a huge budget category with a measurement problem attached to it. Allied Market Research put the corporate training market at $361.5 billion in 2023 and projected it would reach $805.6 billion by 2035. Plenty of that spending still ends in a video, a slide deck, or a course completion badge. Frankly, a completion badge tells you very little.
Synthesia's sharpest point is that static content does not change behavior by itself. Its own sales enablement post says Roleplay Sessions lets reps practise with avatars, receive an overall score and a skills breakdown, then try again. The same post says a pilot with a Fortune 10 company saw 68% of reps return for repeat practice voluntarily. That is a useful number because it points to a real problem: training tools often get assigned, clicked through, and forgotten.
This is also where the moat question starts. AI video generation is getting crowded. Talking-head avatars are no longer strange enough to carry a company forever. If you are a founder watching this space, you should notice the move away from output and toward measurable workflow. Faster video is useful. A scored practice loop that tells a manager where people are weak is harder to swap out.
Recruiting is next
TechCrunch reported that Roleplay is the first release under Sessions, with job interviews and candidate screening planned for later in 2026. That next step will be more sensitive than sales training. It is one thing to let an employee practise with an avatar before a customer call. It is another to put candidates into an AI-led screening process and ask hiring teams to trust the rubric.
Pricing was not disclosed. Existing Synthesia customers are getting access first, with broader availability to small businesses and prosumers planned as inference costs fall, according to TechCrunch. Customers can build their own scenarios or work with Synthesia's consultants using existing training documents as source material. Not glamorous. Most enterprise training teams are not shopping for a blank canvas they have to fill from scratch - they need something that can take the documents and scripts they already have and turn them into a working scenario without a month of setup.
The direction is clear. Synthesia is not walking away from video. It is trying to make video the starting point for a system that watches employees practise, scores the attempt, and gives managers a reason to believe the training did something. If that works, the avatar is no longer the product. The feedback loop is.
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