For years, Synthesia’s pitch was to use AI to help companies create interactive training videos, in minutes, for a fraction of the cost typically associated with developing corporate educational materials. The startup’s newest product is making a different bet: that the real moat of enterprise AI is not just generating content, but proving that it worked.

On Wednesday, the British startup launched Roleplay Sessions, an interactive training product where employees can practice high-stakes conversations like sales pitches, performance reviews and customer complaints with an AI avatar that responds, rejects and then grades them on a rubric.

Roleplay is the first launch of a broader “Sessions” platform that Synthesia plans to expand to other formats, including job interviews and candidate selection, TechCrunch has learned exclusively.

The launch comes as companies take a closer look at whether their spending on AI is paying off. Citing a meta-analysis of learning research, Synthesia argues that most corporate training (including, implicitly, its own core video product) falls short of changing behavior. Trainings tend to inform and demonstrate, but what really pushes someone to learn something is doing it, along with feedback.

“Video works much better than text or sending a document,” Synthesia CEO and co-founder Victor Riparbelli told TechCrunch. “But for most things, we learn better by practicing something rather than just reading about it.”

Roleplaying also puts Synthesia in a more defensible position. The company’s avatar and voice technology are proprietary, but the underlying reasoning intelligence is that of OpenAI. By adding a layer that includes rubrics, performance data, and analytics, Synthesia is positioning itself less as an AI avatar company and more as a performance management platform with a video interface.

“From an executive management level, we’re seeing a lot of interest in mapping talent across your company in a way that was really difficult to do before,” Riparbelli said. “If you have your entire sales team practice with an AI actor, you can get very granular data on how your sales force as a whole is doing.”

Synthesia already has some of Roleplay’s first customers with commercial launches at scale, including “one of the top three companies by market capitalization in Europe, one of the top five Fortune 100 companies, and one of the largest recruiting companies in the world,” according to a company spokesperson.

The two most popular use cases involve training sales and leadership teams: programs like practicing how to sell a product or having a difficult conversation. A lot of it is soft skills training, Riparbelli said.

As with Synthesia’s core product, customers can create their own training programs on the platform or enlist the help of Synthesia consultants to create a custom solution based in part on any training documents and context the company already has.

Roleplay is an enterprise offering for now, but the goal is to offer it more widely to small businesses, prosumers, and potentially educational institutions in the coming months as inference costs continue to fall. Riparbelli believes products like Roleplay represent the next phase of enterprise AI adoption, where companies worry less about whether AI looks good in a social media demo and more about proving it drives measurable business results.