Avatar-enabled mentorship at scale
The HBS Foundry program is piloting AI avatars that provide feedback during practice pitches and board meetings. This approach promises to democratize access to expert critique, enabling students to rehearse more sessions, receive structured feedback, and accelerate learning outcomes. The technology leverages conversational agents to simulate real-world scenarios and adapt to the learner’s level, offering hints, corrections, and strategic prompts. Yet the deployment raises important questions about the role of human mentors, the risk of overreliance on synthetic feedback, and the need to preserve the tacit knowledge that emerges from seasoned instructors. Institutions planning to scale AI tutors must address data privacy, consent, and the potential for bias in feedback models. For practitioners, the Harvard example illustrates how AI can augment education at scale, but it also emphasizes the importance of maintaining human oversight, continuous validation of feedback quality, and ethically designed learning experiences. As AI avatars become more common in professional education, the balance between automation and mentorship will define the next generation of learning ecosystems.