Synthesia is moving beyond AI-generated training videos with the launch of Roleplay Sessions, an enterprise product that lets employees practise difficult workplace conversations with interactive digital avatars and receive immediate coaching.
Released on July 22, the system is designed for situations where watching a presentation is not enough. Employees can rehearse sales calls, customer complaints, performance discussions and management conversations with an avatar that listens, responds and challenges their answers in real time. Each attempt is assessed against a role-specific rubric, while managers receive data showing progress across individuals and teams.
The launch turns Synthesia from primarily a content-creation platform into a system that also tests whether employees can apply what they have learned.
Training Shifts From Watching to Doing
Corporate learning platforms have traditionally focused on distributing information through documents, courses and videos. Those formats can explain a process or demonstrate preferred behaviour, but they rarely give every employee repeated practice and personalised feedback.
Synthesia is positioning Roleplay Sessions as the missing practice layer. Its description of the product draws a clear distinction: “Knowing what to do and being able to do it are different things.”
That problem is becoming more urgent as employers prepare for rapid changes in workplace skills. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 found that employers expect 39% of workers’ existing skills to change or become outdated by 2030. It also identified skills gaps as the leading obstacle to business transformation, cited by 63% of surveyed employers.
Roleplay Sessions is intended to let companies run practice repeatedly without requiring a manager, trainer or actor to participate every time.
How Roleplay Sessions Works
A company begins by choosing or building a scenario, defining the avatar’s persona and setting the skills to be assessed. Examples include cold calls, sales discovery meetings, retail conversations, customer-support cases and discussions with employees who are underperforming, disengaged or seeking promotion.
During a session, the avatar can ask questions, raise objections and adjust its responses according to what the learner says. The experience is designed to feel closer to a live conversation than a scripted quiz or text chatbot.
Afterward, an AI coach first asks the employee to reflect on the exchange. It then explains which parts were effective, where the response fell short and what could be tried differently. The session receives an overall score and a skill-by-skill breakdown based on the company’s rubric.
Employees can repeat the exercise as often as needed. Managers receive a dashboard showing score distributions, improvement over time and areas where individuals or teams may need more coaching. Results can include transcripts, skill breakdowns and performance indicators, with data exportable to a learning management system.
Built for Enterprise Systems
Roleplay Sessions initially supports English, German, Spanish and French. Synthesia’s wider video platform supports content creation in more than 160 languages, although the interactive roleplay range is currently narrower.
The product is built into Synthesia Studio and supports SCORM, allowing companies to deliver sessions through existing learning management systems. Synthesia also lists connections for Workday, BambooHR and HiBob.
The company is emphasising security alongside the coaching features. It says the platform carries SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001, 27701 and 42001 certifications, supports single sign-on and user provisioning, and offers GDPR compliance with European Union data residency.
The Roleplay Sessions feature page does not list standalone pricing and instead directs enterprise buyers to contact Synthesia’s sales team.
Early Pilots Show Repeat Use
Synthesia has released performance figures from early deployments, although the participating companies have not been named and the results have not been independently audited.
At a Fortune 10 company, the startup says learners recorded gains of more than 110% in soft-skill improvement and more than 80% in technical acumen over several weeks. Nearly 70% of participants reportedly returned voluntarily for more practice.
At a large recruitment company, participants achieved close to 30% average skills improvement against a target of 10%, while every core skill measured rose by at least 20%, according to Synthesia. A separate European company used the product for management training focused on high-stakes employee conversations.
An unnamed senior field-enablement executive at a Fortune 10 company said employees “actually wanted to come back and practice,” a result that matters because voluntary repetition is difficult to achieve in mandatory training.
The figures are promising, but they remain vendor-reported pilot results until broader studies provide details about sample sizes, assessment methods and long-term performance.
A Larger Enterprise AI Bet
Roleplay Sessions is the first product in a broader Sessions platform that Synthesia plans to expand with other knowledge-driven, conversational experiences. The move reflects a change in enterprise AI: businesses are increasingly asking not only whether generative systems can create content, but whether they can improve employee performance.
Synthesia has significant backing for that expansion. In January 2026, the London-based company raised $200 million in a Series E round led by Google Ventures, reaching a valuation of $4 billion. It said the funding would support conversational AI agents for learning, knowledge sharing and sales enablement.
CEO and co-founder Victor Riparbelli said at the time that “AI video provides a better, more engaging way for organizations to communicate and learn.” Roleplay Sessions extends that argument by making the avatar an active participant rather than a presenter reading a prepared script.
Synthesia says its platform is used by more than 90% of Fortune 100 companies, giving it a base of large customers that already use AI-generated video for communications and training.
Measurement Brings New Questions
The analytics layer could become one of Roleplay Sessions’ most valuable features, but also one of its most sensitive. Scores from simulated conversations may influence coaching plans or perceptions of employee performance, particularly if companies compare workers across teams.
Employers will need to understand how rubrics are created, whether accents or communication styles affect scoring, how transcripts are stored and who can access individual results. A roleplay score may identify areas for improvement, but it should not be treated as a complete measure of someone’s ability to handle an unpredictable customer or employee.
Used carefully, the system could give workers a private place to make mistakes before a high-pressure conversation. Used without clear safeguards, it could turn training software into another layer of workplace monitoring.
What Comes Next
Synthesia is beginning with sales enablement, manager training, customer support and custom company scenarios. Future Sessions are expected to extend the same conversational technology into additional forms of workplace learning.
The launch marks a meaningful shift for the company. Synthesia’s avatars are no longer limited to delivering information on screen. They can now question employees, react to responses, provide feedback and generate data about how skills develop.
The success of Roleplay Sessions will depend on whether those measurements translate into better real-world performance. If they do, live AI coaching may become a standard part of corporate training rather than an experimental add-on to video courses.
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