Harvard Business School is selling an eight-week entrepreneurship bootcamp for $699 in which AI avatars of its own instructors grade student pitches. The program, HBS Foundry, pairs weekly live sessions with human faculty against on-demand feedback from digital clones built by the avatar startup HeyGen. It is one of the more concrete tests yet of whether a top-tier business school can package its brand-name teachers into software and charge for the copy.
The price point is the tell. A traditional Harvard MBA runs into six figures; HBS Foundry lands at $699 for eight weeks, a spread that only works if a significant portion of the instructional load is handled by machines. The live sessions with real instructors run weekly, but the between-class feedback loop — the part that scales badly with human faculty — is where the avatars sit.
Flybridge Capital co-founder Jeff Bussgang is among the instructors whose likeness has been cloned into the course. New York Times reporter Sarah Kessler tried the system by pitching a fake business, Uber for bananas, to the AI version of Bussgang. Both the real Bussgang and his digital copy panned the idea, though Kessler noted the avatar delivered its critique with a frozen smile.
Key facts
- 01HBS Foundry is an eight-week bootcamp priced at $699, aimed at aspiring entrepreneurs outside the traditional MBA pipeline.
- 02AI avatars of real instructors, built by HeyGen, handle feedback on practice pitches and mock board meetings between weekly live sessions.
- 03Flybridge Capital co-founder Jeff Bussgang is one of the instructors whose likeness was cloned into the program.
- 04Project director Katharina Rings initially planned a chatbot, but pivoted to avatars after trial students asked for a more guided experience.
The design was not the original plan. Project director Katharina Rings said she initially envisioned the AI component as something closer to a chatbot. After HBS released a trial version, students pushed for a more guided, human-feeling experience, and the program shifted toward full avatars with faces attached to specific faculty names.
Student reception, at least at this stage, appears to be positive. Foundry participants told Kessler they like the avatars, a datapoint that runs against the more visible undergraduate backlash against generative AI on campuses.
Bussgang himself has been candid about the strangeness of watching a video model wear his face and issue investment feedback. He called the digital copy creepy in the same breath that he defended it as something students are actively responding to. That mix — mild personal discomfort, strong student pull — is roughly the posture most executives who license their likeness to an AI product end up settling into.
For HeyGen, the deal is a marquee reference customer. The company has built its business on turning short video samples into controllable digital humans, and a Harvard-branded rollout gives it a credential that will travel to every corporate training team currently priced out of hiring named instructors. The avatar is the product; the professor is the input.
The competitive frame here is not other business schools. It is the broader market of AI-assisted education products — the interview coaches, the pitch simulators, the executive-education platforms — that have been trying to replace expensive human feedback with cheaper software loops for the better part of two years. Harvard entering that market with a $699 SKU pulls the price ceiling down and pulls the brand ceiling up in the same motion.
There are open questions the program has not yet answered publicly. It is unclear how instructors are compensated for the ongoing use of their likeness, how long the avatars will remain in the course after a professor leaves, or what happens when a student receives materially bad advice from a clone rather than the original. Harvard has not disclosed those terms, and Bussgang's on-the-record posture has been about vibe, not contracts.
The bet is that most of what an early-stage founder needs from a Harvard instructor — someone to poke holes in a pitch, ask about the unit economics, flag the obvious competitor — is close enough to a repeatable pattern that a well-built avatar can do it at 3 a.m. for a fraction of the seat cost. If that bet holds, the interesting question is not whether other business schools follow. It is which named investors and operators sign the next avatar deals, and whether the fee structure holds up once the novelty wears off and students start comparing the clone's feedback to the professor's, side by side.
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