AI avatars are here in full force—and they’re serving some of the world’s biggest companies
Social Sharing
06.26.2025
Senior Finance Reporter and author of Term Sheet
From Fortune:
Constructing an avatar of myself is even weirder than I expected.
It’s a choreographed experience that made me feel about as socially awkward as I’ve ever felt while alone. I gave the avatar platform—in this case, Synthesia, an AI video company based in London—access to the camera on my laptop. Over the course of about two minutes, I read lines out loud while scrolling down the screen:
Before I proceed, I reconnect with a joyful feeling.
She laughs every time the breeze tickles her nose.
Then I followed up with a series of positive, corporate-friendly statements in the vein of: Imagine the impact we can make with this revolutionary idea!
The vibe wasn’t bad, but it’s strange—the process made me feel vulnerable, like I was giving the computer a piece of me. It’s also fast—the whole process took about 10 minutes, including clicking around at the beginning, knocking over a coffee cup, and reading the script twice in an effort to ameliorate some of my awkwardness from the first go-round. I submitted the video and Synthesia told me I’d have an avatar in one day. A short gestation period for a digital version of me, I reckon, given that the version I have now took 32 years to make.
Over the last year, 150,000 Synthesia users have made AI-generated avatars of themselves. (Customers also frequently choose from among the company’s 250 stock avatars.) And while I built my avatar in the name of journalism, the most common use cases for Synthesia are highly corporate: business training and internal communications videos. Synthesia’s avatars have made impressive headway across the business world: The company says it currently has more than 65,000 customers, and serves over 70% of the Fortune 100. The company, which now has 500 employees, has raised more than $330 million from venture capitalists, including big names like FirstMark, Kleiner Perkins, GV, Accel, and NEA.
