At first glance, Harvard Business School senior lecturer Jeff Bussgang looks ordinary on a video call, smiling, ready to hear a founder’s pitch. He isn’t there. The student is talking to an artificial intelligence avatar built from Bussgang’s likeness, one of seven Harvard faculty who volunteered to be cloned, Entrepreneur reported.

The avatars power HBS Foundry, an eight-week, $699 bootcamp where founders rehearse pitches, sales calls and board meetings against AI versions of Harvard instructors before facing the real thing. Harvard built the avatars with HeyGen, a video AI startup, and 760 founders have gone through the program since it opened in April, according to a Harvard spokesperson, Fortune reported.

New York Times reporter Sarah Kessler tested the system herself, pitching Bussgang’s avatar a deliberately weak idea, an “Uber for bananas.” Both the real Bussgang and his AI double were unconvinced, though Kessler noted the avatar gave itself away with a fixed, unmoving smile, TechCrunch reported.

Founders have spent up to 10 hours at a stretch with a single avatar, according to faculty co-chair Tom Eisenmann, who said the avatars were deliberately built to push back on a weak idea rather than simply agree with it, IBTimes UK reported. “My students love it,” Bussgang said.

Dragana Savic, a founder who raised more than $1 million for her company, INIA Biosciences, said practicing on the avatars was worth it before she faced a real investor, according to the same IBTimes UK report.

Harvard is not the only school scaling faculty through AI, and it is not the first.

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