{"id":5957,"date":"2026-08-25T09:43:32","date_gmt":"2026-08-25T09:43:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=5957"},"modified":"2026-08-25T09:43:32","modified_gmt":"2026-08-25T09:43:32","slug":"harvards-699-startup-bootcamp-has-professors-who-never-sleep-but-thats-because-theyre-ai-clones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=5957","title":{"rendered":"Harvard\u2019s $699 startup bootcamp has professors who never sleep\u2013but that\u2019s because they\u2019re AI clones"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The school is now putting AI versions of its faculty to work in a $699 online startup bootcamp, where aspiring founders can rehearse investor pitches, sales calls, and board meetings\u2014all with AI clones of Harvard instructors. They can even test their pitches with an AI avatar repeatedly before a real meeting.<\/p>\n

Read more The Fed doesn\u2019t know who\u2019s financing the $3 trillion AI boom<\/a><\/p>\n

The eight-week program is part of HBS Foundry, which Harvard describes as an \u201cAI-native digital workspace\u201d for entrepreneurs. The startup bootcamp is equipped with \u201cpersonalized AI mentorship modeled on Harvard Business School faculty\u201d alongside live sessions with experts, culminating with an opportunity to pitch to investors for $100,000. So far, 760 founders have participated in the bootcamp, according to a Harvard spokesperson.<\/p>\n

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\u201cThe idea for the AI experiences came from founders themselves, who wanted opportunities to practice and be challenged before getting in front of mentors and investors, so those conversations could be even more meaningful,\u201d Kat Rings, Foundry\u2019s director, told Fortune<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The \u201cclones\u201d include seven HBS professors and senior lecturers with backgrounds spanning venture capital, business-model design, board dynamics and startup strategy. Their participation was voluntary, with the program having dedicated interviews and recording sessions, testing and ongoing faculty feedback as part of the process.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe goal isn\u2019t to create a substitute for me,\u201d Shikhar Ghosh, one of the cloned HBS professors , told Fortune<\/em>. \u201cIt\u2019s to give founders another way to prepare and challenge their thinking, so that when we do come together live, we can spend more of that valuable time on the questions where human judgment and conversation matter most.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Notably, Foundry\u2019s startup bootcamp is not an HBS degree program nor for academic credit, but rather, a way to \u201cextend entrepreneurial support to high-potential founders wherever they are, including people who may never study at Harvard or have access to the networks and resources of a major innovation ecosystem,\u201d the Harvard spokesperson told Fortune<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The experiment falls into the growing dichotomy of how AI is addressed and used on campus. On one hand, professors have complained about students cheating on exams using AI, with\u00a0Brown University\u2019s Robert Serrano, for example, urging universities to stamp out AI-enabled cheating. On the other hand, some universities are using AI to scale otherwise scarce faculty time into a digital product. Imperial Business School has already created digital twins of professors, while Georgia Tech has deployed AI teaching assistant Jill Watson across large online classes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Harvard is not the first school to experiment with turning a professor into software. Last year, Georgia Tech professor David Joyner had created an AI avatar of himself, dubbed \u201cDAI-vid,\u201d for an online generative AI course on edX, an open online course provider founded by Harvard and MIT. The avatar was modeled on Joyner\u2019s appearance and voice and was framed as part of a broader effort to democratize online learning.<\/p>\n

Read more Trump readies a new tariff to punish China for its flood of cheap exports\u2014without endangering his trade truce or his summit with Xi Jinping<\/a><\/p>\n

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\u201cMuch like online courses have made lectures from top universities broadly available, AI has the potential to go a step further and make not just a professor\u2019s knowledge, but some version of their perspective and judgment, available at scale,\u201d Lindsay Tanne Howe, whose company LogicPrep helps students get into top schools, told Fortune<\/em>. \u201cBut what it can\u2019t replicate is everything that happens between people.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Kian Katanforoosh, a Stanford lecturer and founder of AI skills platform Workera, told Fortune <\/em>that AI \u201ccan replicate many of the things professors do repeatedly\u201d like answering unlimited questions and explaining concepts in different ways, but can\u2019t truly know a student or be there for them.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat AI cannot fully replicate is knowing a student as a person,\u201d Katanforoosh said, explaining that a professor can recognize potential, inspire a student and make an introduction based on years of human interaction.\u201cAI can simulate some of these behaviors, but today it cannot put its own reputation at stake or genuinely care what happens next.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Scaling faculty through AI also creates a potentially awkward question for universities: At what point does efficiency begin to undermine what students believe they are paying for? College students already object to professors outsourcing lesson planning and grading to AI, as Fortune <\/em>previously reported, and while AI is part of Harvard\u2019s Foundry proposition and not going on behind the scenes, it could raise a similar tension.<\/p>\n

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\u201cIt can\u2019t necessarily replicate the experience of an elite education,\u201d Howe said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Joyner, who\u2019s now Georgia Tech\u2019s interim Vice Provost for AI in Education, told Fortune<\/em> that Harvard\u2019s startup bootcamp\u2019s price tag\u2013relatively inexpensive compared to the business school\u2019s annual tuition of over $84,000\u2013is part of the push to make higher education more available, but stressed that the role of the professors themselves is \u201ckey\u201d to making AI avatars.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u201cFaculty using AI to expand the number of students that they can reach and the quality of the instruction they give can have an enormous positive effect,\u201d Joyner told Fortune<\/em> over email. \u201cBut if companies or universities try to build these tools out of existing content without strong collaboration with the person being represented, there\u2019s no way to really know if the experience is representing the faculty themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more Bosses are convinced Gen Z fakes Wi-Fi outages and sick days to sneak off in summer\u2014but 1 in 2 senior managers are guilty of the same thing<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Founders can rehearse pitches, sales calls and board meetings repeatedly with avatars modeled on seven HBS faculty members<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5956,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[310],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5957","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-colleges-and-universities"],"yoast_head":"\nHarvard\u2019s $699 startup bootcamp has professors who never sleep\u2013but that\u2019s because they\u2019re AI clones - Cross Country Moving Team<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=5957\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Harvard\u2019s $699 startup bootcamp has professors who never sleep\u2013but that\u2019s because they\u2019re AI clones - 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