Synthesia launched Roleplay Sessions on Wednesday. It is an interactive product where employees practice high-stakes workplace conversations with an AI avatar that responds in real time, adapts to what they say, and then scores their performance against a set rubric. Managers get analytics showing how individuals and teams performed across sessions.
The company built its reputation on something simpler: letting businesses create training videos with AI avatars instead of hiring production crews. That product spread widely. Synthesia now counts roughly 55,000 customers globally, including the vast majority of Fortune 100 companies. It crossed $150 million in annual recurring revenue earlier this year and raised $200 million from Google Ventures, Nvidia, and others at a $4 billion valuation, nearly double what it was worth just 12 months before.
So why change the product now? The answer is that video training has a ceiling. A video can inform someone. It can demonstrate a technique. But it cannot tell you whether the person watching it could actually handle the situation if it happened tomorrow. That gap matters more as companies face pressure to justify what they spend on training. In a 2025 survey, nearly one in three senior leaders admitted they could not connect their training budget to any measurable business outcome. Watching completion rates climb on a dashboard is not the same as knowing your sales team can handle an objection.
Roleplay Sessions addresses that directly. Instead of watching someone else handle a difficult conversation, the employee has the conversation themselves. The AI avatar plays the other side, and the system records every response, scores communication quality, and surfaces the results for managers. The two most common uses so far are sales coaching and practicing difficult conversations, things like delivering negative feedback or handling a complaint from an angry client.
This is also a strategic shift for Synthesia as a company. Its avatar and voice technology are its own, but the intelligence running the conversations is built on OpenAI's models. Any competitor could build a similar front end. What is harder to copy is the layer on top: the rubrics, the performance data, the analytics, and the historical record of how a workforce has developed over time. By owning that data layer, Synthesia moves toward being a performance management system that happens to use video, rather than a video tool that anyone could replicate.
For companies evaluating this, the practical question is whether the data is actually useful. The early customers are large enterprises with dedicated learning and development teams who can build the rubrics and interpret the results. The value proposition is clearest for roles where conversation quality directly affects revenue or reputation: sales teams, customer service, and management training. A procurement manager who wants their team to negotiate better, or an operations director whose supervisors struggle with performance reviews, can see an obvious application.
Synthesia says Roleplay is just the first product under a broader Sessions platform, with job interviews and candidate screening planned next. Pricing for smaller businesses has not been confirmed, but the company says it will open access within a few months as AI conversation costs continue to fall.
The underlying trend is worth tracking regardless of which tool a company uses. Enterprises spent years buying AI tools and measuring success by how many employees signed up. That era is closing. The question now is whether the tool changed how someone actually works, and whether that change shows up somewhere that matters to the business.