Harvard Business School is taking an unusual step into the future of education by offering a $699 entrepreneurship bootcamp in which students are taught, in part, by artificial intelligence versions of the school’s own faculty members.
The program uses AI-generated avatars of Harvard Business School instructors to deliver lessons and interact with students. The digital instructors are designed to resemble their human counterparts, including their appearance and voices, creating an experience that attempts to bring the presence of a Harvard professor into an online learning environment without requiring the professor to be physically present.
The initiative represents one of the more visible experiments by a major university with generative artificial intelligence. While universities around the world have increasingly used AI tools for research, tutoring, writing assistance and administrative work, Harvard’s use of AI faculty avatars pushes the technology further into the teaching process itself.
The new bootcamp is designed for entrepreneurs and aspiring business founders who want to develop practical skills for launching and growing businesses. Rather than serving as a traditional degree program, it is positioned as a shorter professional education experience that students can complete online.
The course costs $699, putting it within the range of professional development programs rather than traditional university tuition. Students receive access to course content and AI-powered versions of instructors who can guide them through lessons and concepts.
The technology behind the program is intended to make the digital instructors feel more like real teachers than conventional prerecorded videos. Instead of simply watching a professor deliver a lecture, students can interact with AI representations of faculty members as they work through the material.
That approach reflects a broader transformation taking place in online education. For years, universities have attempted to replicate classroom experiences through recorded lectures, discussion boards and video conferences. Generative AI now offers institutions the possibility of creating digital instructors capable of responding to students and providing explanations on demand.
For Harvard Business School, the technology could provide a way to extend the reach of its faculty expertise. A professor can only teach a limited number of students in a physical classroom and has a finite amount of time for individual interaction. An AI version of that professor, however, can potentially be available to students at any hour and across multiple time zones.
The potential benefits are particularly relevant to entrepreneurship education. Starting a business often requires people to learn concepts related to strategy, marketing, finance, leadership and decision-making. AI-powered instructors could potentially guide students through these subjects while allowing them to learn at their own pace.
The technology could also make online education more personalized. Instead of following a fixed sequence of lectures, students could ask questions, request explanations or revisit difficult concepts. AI systems can respond immediately, eliminating the need to wait for an instructor to become available.
However, Harvard’s experiment also raises important questions about what students are actually receiving when an AI avatar represents a professor.
An AI clone may look and sound like a particular instructor, but it is not the instructor. The system does not possess the professor’s consciousness, personal judgment or lived experience. Its responses are generated by artificial intelligence based on the information and instructions provided to it.
That distinction is especially important in fields such as entrepreneurship, where learning often extends beyond established theories. Successful founders frequently rely on judgment, experience, intuition and conversations with mentors. An AI system may be able to explain a business framework, but students may still benefit from direct interaction with a human who has experienced the uncertainty of building an organization.
The use of AI avatars also raises questions about the changing role of professors. If an AI version of an instructor can deliver lessons and answer routine questions, universities could potentially reduce the amount of time faculty members need to spend on repetitive teaching activities.
Supporters of the technology could argue that this would free professors to focus on higher-value work, including research, mentorship and complex discussions. Critics, however, could worry that universities might eventually use AI to replace some forms of human teaching rather than simply supplement them.
There are also ethical questions surrounding the creation of digital replicas of real people. An instructor’s face, voice and mannerisms are closely connected to their identity. Universities using AI clones therefore need clear agreements about how these digital representations are created, controlled and used.
The issue of authenticity is another potential challenge. Students paying hundreds of dollars for a course associated with Harvard may expect access to the expertise and prestige of its faculty. If much of that experience is delivered by AI, students may question whether they are receiving the same educational value as they would from direct interaction with professors.
At the same time, the experiment illustrates why AI is becoming increasingly difficult for educational institutions to ignore. The technology can dramatically change the economics of teaching by allowing educational content to reach far more people without requiring instructors to repeat the same lectures and explanations.
Harvard’s initiative could therefore become an important test of how students respond to AI-powered education. If learners find the digital faculty engaging and useful, other universities could follow with similar programs. If students find the experience impersonal or insufficient, institutions may conclude that AI works better as a supporting tool than as a substitute for human instruction.
The $699 entrepreneurship bootcamp ultimately represents more than a new online course. It is an experiment in what a university professor could look like in the age of artificial intelligence.
For students, the experience offers access to Harvard-branded instruction through a format that combines traditional academic expertise with AI-generated teaching. For universities, it provides a glimpse of how faculty knowledge could be scaled beyond the physical classroom.
The biggest question is whether an AI avatar can provide something close enough to the experience of learning from a real professor to justify the cost.
As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly embedded in education, Harvard’s experiment suggests that the future classroom may not necessarily eliminate professors. Instead, students could encounter a new hybrid model in which human educators create knowledge and mentorship while AI versions of them deliver lessons, answer questions and extend their reach.
Whether that future feels innovative or unsettling may ultimately depend on how much value students place on the technology—and how much they still want the human being behind the avatar.
