Harvard just put a price tag on talking to a digital copy of its faculty, and that price is $699.
Hi, I’m Maya, and my job is explaining AI agents to people who don’t write code for a living. Usually that means breaking down chatbots or workplace assistants. Today it means explaining why one of the most prestigious business schools on the planet decided that what its startup bootcamp needed was AI avatars of its own instructors.
What Harvard is actually selling
Harvard Business School runs an eight-week bootcamp for entrepreneurs called HBS Foundry. It costs $699. The program includes live sessions with instructors every week, plus virtual simulations. And here’s where it gets interesting for anyone curious about AI agents in the wild: the program also features AI avatars of its instructors, which give students feedback during practice sessions, including practice pitches and board meetings.
The avatars weren’t built by Harvard’s own engineers. They were created by HeyGen, a startup that specializes in AI-generated video avatars. So when a Foundry student rehearses a pitch at midnight, the “professor” responding to them is a synthetic version of a real Harvard instructor, powered by a third-party company’s technology.
Why this matters more than it sounds
Let me translate this out of press-release language. An AI avatar, in this context, is a digital stand-in for a real person. It looks like the instructor, it responds like an instructor might, and it’s available whenever you are. The real human still shows up for the weekly live sessions. The avatar handles the repetitive, unglamorous middle part: watching you practice the same pitch for the fifth time and telling you what to fix.
That division of labor is the part I find genuinely useful to think about. For years, the promise of AI agents has been “software that does tasks for you.” What Harvard is doing flips that slightly: this is software that does a task as someone else. The instructor’s expertise gets bottled, duplicated, and made available at 2 a.m.
For students, that’s a real benefit. Feedback is the most expensive part of education. A professor’s time doesn’t scale. An avatar’s time does. If you’re an entrepreneur rehearsing for a board meeting, getting critique on demand beats waiting a week for office hours.
The questions I’d want answered
But I’d be a bad explainer if I didn’t flag what we don’t know, and there’s plenty.
- How good is the feedback? An avatar that looks like a Harvard professor isn’t the same as one that thinks like a Harvard professor. The face is HeyGen’s technology. The judgment underneath is a separate question, and it’s the one that actually matters when you’re deciding whether $699 is money well spent.
- What happens to the professors? When your likeness can give feedback without you, your employer’s math about your time changes. Today the avatars supplement live sessions. Whether that balance holds is a question every professional whose expertise can be simulated should be asking, not just academics.
- What are students really paying for? Part of the value of a Harvard program has always been proximity to Harvard people. An avatar offers the appearance of that proximity. Whether students experience it as a helpful tool or a substitute teacher in a nice suit will shape how they feel about the price.
My honest read
I don’t think this is a scandal, and I don’t think it’s a gimmick either. I think it’s a preview.
Harvard putting its name on avatar-assisted teaching does something no startup demo could: it makes the idea respectable. When an institution this cautious about its brand decides that synthetic instructors are acceptable for paying students, other schools, corporate trainers, and coaching businesses take notice. The $699 price point matters too. That’s not Harvard-degree money. That’s accessible-to-normal-people money, which tells you this is designed to scale.
For non-technical readers, my takeaway is simple: AI agents are moving from “assistant that helps you” to “stand-in that represents someone else.” That shift will show up in education first, because education has an obvious bottleneck (expert time) and an obvious fix (expert copies). But it won’t stop there. Doctors, lawyers, financial advisors, therapists — any field where expertise is scarce and questions are repetitive is a candidate.
So no, I’m not outraged that Harvard cloned its professors. I’m paying attention, because whatever happens in that $699 bootcamp is a rehearsal for how the rest of us will meet synthetic experts. And unlike the students, we don’t get to practice first.
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