Harvard Business School Deploys AI Faculty Clones in Startup Bootcamp

Harvard turns professors into AI practice partners

Harvard Business School has integrated AI replicas of seven faculty members into its online startup bootcamp, allowing aspiring entrepreneurs to rehearse investor pitches and sales calls with digital versions of instructors who never tire of repetition.

The eight-week program, priced at $699, operates through HBS Foundry, which the school characterizes as an "AI-native digital workspace" for entrepreneurs. Since launch, 760 founders have participated in the bootcamp, which combines AI mentorship sessions with live expert instruction and culminates in opportunities to pitch for $100,000 in funding, according to a Harvard spokesperson.

The AI clones represent professors and senior lecturers with expertise spanning venture capital, business-model design, board dynamics, and startup strategy. Faculty participation was voluntary, involving dedicated interviews, recording sessions, testing, and ongoing feedback to shape the digital representations.

"The 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," Kat Rings, Foundry's director, told Fortune, which first reported the details.

Why it matters

This experiment represents a concrete test of whether elite universities can scale their most valuable asset—faculty expertise—without diluting the premium experience students expect. At $699 versus Harvard's $84,000+ annual business school tuition, the bootcamp demonstrates how AI could democratize access to top-tier instruction while raising questions about what constitutes authentic educational value. The approach also highlights a growing divide in higher education: some professors combat AI-enabled cheating while others volunteer to become AI themselves.

Faculty see preparation tool, not replacement

Shikhar Ghosh, one of the cloned HBS professors, emphasized the technology's role as a preparatory mechanism rather than a substitute. "The goal isn't to create a substitute for me," Ghosh told Fortune. "It's 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."

The bootcamp does not offer HBS degree credit or academic credentials. Instead, Harvard positions it as a way to "extend 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," according to the spokesperson.

Universities navigate AI's dual role on campus

The initiative reflects higher education's conflicted relationship with AI. While some faculty members, including Brown University's Robert Serrano, have urged institutions to combat AI-enabled cheating on exams, others are volunteering to become digital teaching tools. Imperial Business School has created digital twins of professors, and Georgia Tech has deployed AI teaching assistant Jill Watson across large online classes.

Kian Katanforoosh, a Stanford lecturer and founder of AI skills platform Workera, told Fortune that AI "can replicate many of the things professors do repeatedly" like answering unlimited questions and explaining concepts multiple ways, but falls short on human dimensions. "What AI cannot fully replicate is knowing a student as a person," Katanforoosh explained, noting that professors can recognize potential, inspire students, and make introductions based on years of human interaction.

David Joyner, now Georgia Tech's interim Vice Provost for AI in Education, stressed that faculty involvement remains essential to these tools' legitimacy. "Faculty 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," Joyner told Fortune. "But if companies or universities try to build these tools out of existing content without strong collaboration with the person being represented, there's no way to really know if the experience is representing the faculty themselves."

The details were first reported by Fortune.