As soon as the video call starts, Harvard Business School’s famous professor Jeff Busgang appears on the screen smiling and asks the person sitting in front to tell his idea. The student humorously presents the idea of an Uber-like app for faster delivery of fruits. The professor continues to listen to him with attention and patience. Although they look exactly like real people, they are actually their AI-based digital clones or avatars, created through computer technology. The aim of this ‘Digital Professor’ is to interact with the students and provide them guidance. When the real Professor Basgang was asked about this experience, he laughed and said that it feels a bit strange to see such a digital version of himself, but the students are liking it very much. In fact, Harvard Business School has started an eight-week entrepreneurship bootcamp called ‘HBS Foundry’, so that it can reach out to entrepreneurs from around the world beyond its 900 MBA students. The teaching work in this course is largely done by AI based digital clones of professors. Students can practice pitching, sales calls, and board meetings over video calls with these avatars over and over again. Its aim is to provide practical startup training without hesitation. Pranav Sultania, a PhD student of mechanical engineering at Boston University, took the help of this AI system for his underwater robotics startup ‘Magnesis Robotics’. He says that being a researcher and entrepreneur, he does not have any fixed time limit, so the AI avatars are available even at midnight to listen to his pitch. This helped him learn to focus on business utility rather than technical detail in front of investors. Dragana Savic, founder of a company working on autoimmune diseases, practiced several times in ‘AI board meetings’ before meeting real investors. This removed his hesitation and increased his confidence. The fee for this course is around Rs 67 thousand. These ‘avatars’ have been trained in line with Harvard’s strict grading tradition. Chatbots usually talk sweetly to please users, but Harvard has deliberately made its AI agents strict. Tom Eigenmann, faculty co-chair of the project, explains that these AI bots have also been trained like Harvard’s strict grading tradition. No student’s idea gets the ‘green signal’ in the first attempt. Many times students keep brainstorming with AI for ten hours to get their idea passed.
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‘AI professor’ listening to startup ideas, available 24 hours a day: Harvard Business School experiment; Teaching the intricacies of business before meeting investors
