An eight-week online entrepreneurship bootcamp launched by Harvard Business School lets participants pitch a start-up idea to an artificial-intelligence avatar modelled on a real professor.
The HBS Foundry programme, designed to train aspiring entrepreneurs, costs $699, or roughly Rs 67,000. Participants are taken through the entire process of building a start-up, from refining an idea to pitching it to investors and customers.
The programme combines course material from Harvard Business School, AI agents trained on faculty expertise, a community of fellow entrepreneurs and simulated video conversations with AI avatars. The plan is to take Harvard’s entrepreneurship training to far more than the roughly 900 students the business school admits each year – and there are many takers, according to The New York Times.
The HBS Foundry programme raises questions about the future of higher education and the role of teachers. For India, programmes like HBS Foundry offer the expertise of renowned teachers from prestigious universities. Foreign universities that have opened campuses in India could likewise use AI avatars of their distinguished members to teach students.
Could AI professors address the shortage of quality teachers and education infrastructure in India? For instance, a survey of schools in 10 states by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences found a shortage of...