Harvard’s $699 startup bootcamp has professors who never sleep–but that’s because they’re AI clones

The newest Harvard Business School professor never sleeps, can hear the same pitch 50 times and technically isn’t an instructor at all.

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—all with AI clones of Harvard instructors.

They can even test their pitches with an AI avatar repeatedly before a real meeting.

The eight-week program is part of HBS Foundry , which Harvard describes as an “AI-native digital workspace” for entrepreneurs.

The startup bootcamp is equipped with “personalized AI mentorship modeled on Harvard Business School faculty” 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.

“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 .

The “clones” 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.

“The goal isn’t to create a substitute for me,” Shikhar Ghosh, one of the cloned HBS professors , 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.” Notably, Foundry’s startup bootcamp is not an HBS degree program nor for academic credit, but rather, 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,” the Harvard spokesperson told Fortune .

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 Brown University’s 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.