Universities Are Cloning Their Professors With AI

At first glance, Harvard Business School senior lecturer Jeff Bussgang appears ordinary during a video call, smiling and ready to hear a founder's pitch. However, he is not actually present—the student is conversing with an AI avatar constructed from Bussgang's likeness, one of seven Harvard faculty members who have volunteered to be cloned.

These avatars facilitate HBS Foundry, an eight-week, $699 bootcamp where founders rehearse pitches, sales calls, and board meetings against AI versions of Harvard instructors prior to engaging with the real instructors.

The avatars were built using HeyGen, a video AI startup. Since their inception in April, 760 founders have completed the program, according to a Harvard spokesperson. During a test by New York Times reporter Sarah Kessler, Bussgang's AI double was unconvinced by her deliberately weak pitch for an "Uber for bananas." Both the real Bussgang and his AI counterpart were unimpressed, though Kessler noted the avatar's fixed, unmoving smile, which gave it away.

Faculty co-chair Tom Eisenmann revealed that founders often spend up to 10 hours interacting with a single avatar. These avatars are designed to challenge weak ideas rather than simply agreeing with them. "My students love it," Bussgang remarked. Another founder, Dragana Savic, who raised over $1 million for her company, INIA Biosciences, found the avatar practice invaluable before meeting with actual investors, according to IBTimes UK.

Harvard is not the only institution adopting this technology. Imperial Business School has created digital twins of its staff, and Georgia Tech has utilized an AI teaching assistant named Jill Watson since 2016. Unlike Harvard's avatars, Jill Watson was initially a simpler system based on IBM's Watson platform, which accurately answered student questions on class discussion forums, so convincingly that students initially did not realize she was not human.

With Jill Watson, Georgia Tech students who had access to the AI assistant earned more A grades (66%) and fewer C grades (3%) than those without access (62% and 7%, respectively), with the AI answering questions correctly 78.7% of the time compared to the general AI assistant's 30.7%.

The founders of the AI professors emphasize that their avatars are intended as supplementary tools, not replacements. Shikhar Ghosh, one of the faculty members cloned, stated that the goal is not to create a substitute for the actual professor. More than 100 universities across the United States have tested Foundry with their own students and entrepreneurs, according to Harvard.

This widespread adoption raises the question of whether teaching could eventually shift from traditional classrooms to software, potentially undermining the perceived value of access to expert instructors. While David Joyner, Georgia Tech's interim vice provost for AI in education, acknowledges that Harvard's relatively low price point contributes to making higher education more accessible, he stresses that the role of professors remains "key" to the effectiveness of the avatars.