Harvard Built AI Clones of Its Professors and Sold Startup Courses for $699: 'Creepy'

Harvard Business School has been selling access to artificial intelligence (AI) copies of its own lecturers for $699 (£512), The New York Times reported this month. Seven lecturers volunteered, and one of them, Jeff Bussgang, called his own double a little 'creepy'.

The copies are video avatars that answer questions on screen. Bussgang told the paper his students love them anyway. The course is called Foundry, runs eight weeks online, and opened in April.

New York Times reporter Sarah Kessler tested the course by pitching a deliberately silly idea to Bussgang's double: an Uber for bananas. The avatar heard her out, stayed unconvinced, and gave itself away by looping one shoulder movement.

Harvard told Fortune last week that 760 founders have been through the course. The school said Foundry is not a degree and earns no course credits. All seven lecturers volunteered, according to Harvard.

Foundry Costs Less Than One Percent of Tuition

A year of tuition at Harvard Business School costs $84,760 (£62,140). Foundry costs $699. Over eight weeks online, founders bring an idea and rehearse it on the avatars, first as an investor pitch and then as a sales call. Only then do they face a real investor.

The seven lecturers include Shikhar Ghosh, who founded eight technology companies before he taught, and Jim Matheson, a former Navy fighter pilot who now backs science startups. Each sat for interviews and recording sessions, Fortune reported. An AI video firm, HeyGen, built the avatars. Harvard said more than 100 universities have tried the course out, across all 50 American states.

Katharina Rings, Foundry's project director, said founders asked for the avatars, wanting somewhere to practise first. Founders used the chat window more once the team added a photograph of the professor behind it, so the photographs stayed. Anyone can apply, including founders paying their own way and students from other universities. The most promising are invited to Harvard to compete for $100,000 (£73,300) in funding.

Harvard's Own Page Counts Alumni, Not Founders

Foundry's home page opens with big headline figures, among them 1,757 startups launched and $84.6B (£62.0B) raised. None of those belong to the course. A footnote on the same page says they cover Harvard Business School graduates from 2014 to 2025. That period ends before Foundry opened.

Foundry's own number is 760, and the page does not say what became of those founders. The course has run only since April. Its aim has already narrowed. Foundry now takes founders in deep tech and materials science, meaning companies built on hard science rather than an app.

Cloned Lecturers Say They Are Not Being Replaced

Ghosh said the copies were never meant to replace him. 'The goal isn't to create a substitute for me,' he told Fortune. His avatar is there so that his own hours with founders count for more. Bussgang co-founded the venture firm Flybridge Capital, so his double hears pitches he hears for a living. Tom Eisenmann, a faculty co-chair, said the avatars were built to push back rather than agree.

Founders have spent 10 hours at a stretch with one avatar, Eisenmann said. Dragana Savic signed up after raising more than $1M (£733,000) for INIA Biosciences, a firm building a device for autoimmune disease. Practising on the avatars was worth it, she said. Early on, a founder's idea is often the only thing they own. Foundry says it does not train its models on that work.

Harvard is not the first. Imperial Business School has built digital twins of its own staff, and Georgia Tech has been running an AI teaching assistant called Jill Watson, Fortune reported. David Joyner, who runs AI in teaching at Georgia Tech, built an avatar of himself in 2025. If one is built from old recordings without the person taking part, he warned, nobody can tell whether it really represents them.

Students already object when staff quietly hand off marking to AI. Foundry, however, is the other way around—sold openly with seven names and faces, and their consent given first. Harvard isn't hiding the AI. The numbers on Foundry's front page, though, were earned before it opened.