HBS Foundry uses HeyGen-built AI clones of instructors — including Flybridge co-founder Jeff Bussgang — to sit through practice pitches and board meetings and give feedback, while real instructors still run weekly live sessions.
2026-08-23 · by Moe Ameen
Harvard Business School has built AI avatars of its instructors into Foundry, its $699, eight-week startup bootcamp, and is using them to coach founders through the parts of the program that scale badly with humans: practice pitches and mock board meetings. Rather than wait for a scheduled slot with a professor, a founder can present to a digital clone of an instructor and get feedback on the spot, as many times as they want. Real instructors still run live sessions every week; the avatars handle the high-repetition rehearsal in between. The move was reported around August 22, 2026.
The avatars are made with HeyGen, the AI avatar-video platform, and are modeled on named Harvard experts. In a New York Times account of the program, reporter Sarah Kessler pitched to an AI version of Flybridge Capital co-founder and HBS lecturer Jeff Bussgang; the avatar delivered investor-style feedback but, she noted, held a "noticeably frozen smile" through the pitch. Bussgang said his students love it while allowing that the digital version of himself is "a little creepy." Foundry lists instructors including Shikhar Ghosh, Christina Wallace, and Jim Matheson, and pitches the AI layer as a way to rehearse investor pitches, sales calls, and board meetings against a clone built to challenge you.
The design changed based on how students actually used it. Project director Katharina Rings said the initial concept was closer to a chatbot, but after a trial, students preferred a more guided, interactive experience — which pushed the team toward a talking avatar that runs a structured session rather than a text back-and-forth. Foundry has been tested across more than 100 universities, and founders who complete the program compete for a $100,000 funding prize at Harvard Business School.
The notable part is not that a school made an avatar — those are cheap now — but where Harvard put it in the workflow. The avatar is not the product; it is one component inside a curriculum, a live-instruction schedule, and a feedback loop. Treat any specific detail about how a given instructor's clone behaves as subject to change; what is confirmed is the shape of the program and that the avatars are HeyGen-built stand-ins used for practice feedback, not replacements for the human instructors.
Harvard and [Kompozy](/) start from the same raw material — a HeyGen avatar of a real person — and then point it at opposite jobs. Harvard wires its instructor clones into a closed portal to give founders live feedback: the avatar talks back inside the bootcamp and never leaves it. Kompozy takes the same avatar technology and points it outward, at production and distribution — turning a persona into finished, published content across your channels instead of a coach that lives in one app. Same building block, and the value in both cases comes from the system built around it, not the clone itself.
Concretely: in Kompozy your avatar is an [AI Influencer persona](/glossary/persona-brief) that drives real output. [Persona Shorts](/glossary/persona-shorts) render a captioned talking-head clip from a script; Persona HeyGen produces longer, multi-scene [avatar video](/glossary/avatar-video); and [Persona Frames](/glossary/hyperframes) composite that avatar into a brand-exact template. The same persona also carries into carousels, quote graphics, photo posts, a blog, and a newsletter — 18 formats from one source, held to one voice by the Persona Brief. Then [Autopilot](/glossary/autopilot) schedules and publishes the set across the eight social platforms plus blog and email, with a per-post review gate before anything ships. If you found Harvard's move interesting because you want an avatar that produces and distributes content rather than one that only critiques a pitch, that outward-facing engine is the difference. For context on where avatar tooling is going, see how [HeyGen rebuilt avatar video around AI agents](/news/heygen-video-agent-html-driven-ai-video-agents).
Harvard Business School built AI avatar clones of its instructors into Foundry, its $699 eight-week startup bootcamp. Founders present practice pitches and mock board meetings to the avatars and get feedback on demand, while real instructors still run weekly live sessions. The avatars handle high-repetition rehearsal that would not scale with human professors.
The avatars are made with HeyGen, the AI avatar-video platform, and are modeled on named Harvard experts such as Flybridge Capital co-founder and HBS lecturer Jeff Bussgang. HeyGen turns a real person into a talking-head clone that can present a script or, in this case, deliver structured feedback inside the program.
No. Real instructors still run live sessions every week; the avatars handle the practice-and-feedback repetitions in between. The program was described as human instruction with an AI coaching layer added on top, not a swap. The team also moved from a text chatbot to a guided avatar session after students preferred a more interactive experience.
Harvard uses its avatars for interactive, one-to-one coaching inside a closed bootcamp. A content engine like Kompozy uses the same HeyGen avatar technology for the opposite job: producing and publishing finished video and posts. In Kompozy your avatar becomes an AI Influencer persona that drives Persona Shorts, longer avatar video, carousels, and more, then Autopilot publishes across the eight social platforms plus blog and email.