A lot of people are upset that Harvard Business School is charging $699 for a course taught entirely by deepfakes of its faculty. Personally, I’ve never seen a stronger demonstration of margin optimization.
The timeline is currently awash in sentimental weeping over Harvard Business School’s decision to launch a $699 entrepreneurship bootcamp taught entirely by A.I. avatars of its faculty. Everywhere I look, someone is posting a tear-stained manifesto about the "loss of human connection," the "commodification of mentorship," and the supposedly grim reality of paying Ivy League prices to be lectured by a server farm wearing a tweed jacket.
I just have to laugh. The complainers are completely missing the syllabus. Harvard isn’t selling a compromised educational product; they are offering a live, interactive masterclass in right-sizing your enterprise.
Why pay a tenured professor $250,000 a year, plus benefits, to deliver the exact same slide deck on Porter’s Five Forces every semester? Humans are biological bottlenecks. They require sleep, they demand sabbaticals, and they occasionally go on tangents about their recent divorces that offer zero shareholder value. By digitizing their faculty, Harvard has brilliantly transformed a volatile operating expense into infinitely scalable intellectual property.
I actually enrolled in the bootcamp just to observe the platform for myself, and honestly, it is the most efficient learning environment I have ever experienced. My assigned strategy instructor was an algorithmic clone of a renowned management guru. The avatar was flawless. It didn't pause to clear its throat, it didn't attempt to make awkward eye contact, and most importantly, it didn't waste a single millisecond pretending to care about the specifics of my startup idea. It simply dispensed the optimized B2B syllabus and prompted my credit card for the next module.
The peak of the curriculum came during week two, when the deepfake professor taught a module on "Disruptive Restructuring." Watching an artificial intelligence—which had literally just restructured its human counterpart out of a job—calmly explain how to execute a mass layoff without triggering a PR crisis was a profound, almost spiritual experience. The medium truly is the message.
Historically, our faculty were wasting up to fifteen percent of their working hours interacting with students, which is a catastrophic misallocation of premium brand assets. The avatars allow us to monetize their likeness at scale, freeing the actual professors to focus on their true passion: serving as highly compensated consultants for pharmaceutical monopolies.
The street understands exactly what is happening here. If you are arguing that $699 is too steep a price for a glorified chatbot, you fundamentally misunderstand the product. You aren’t paying for human wisdom. You are paying for the right to place "Harvard Business School" on your pitch deck, which instantly bumps your seed round valuation by at least twenty percent. The meat-sack who originally wrote the course material is entirely incidental to the transaction.
In fact, the human element is already being phased out of the back-end entirely. I reached out to the actual, biological professor whose face was currently teaching my cohort, hoping for a quick networking chat. He informed me that he had recently tried to log into the course portal to update a case study on supply chain logistics, only to find he lacked administrative privileges. The algorithm had locked him out, correctly identifying his manual keyboard inputs as a threat to the platform’s frictionless user experience.
This is exactly the kind of ruthless pivot the best founders I know are already executing. Why stop at educators? Inspired by my $699 deepfake mentor, I took a hard look at my own startup’s overhead. Last week, I realized my VP of Sales was consuming valuable runway with requests for "commissions" and "parental leave." I immediately let him go and replaced him with a language model trained exclusively on his most aggressive outbound emails. Our quarterly revenue is entirely hypothetical at this point, but our margins have never looked better.
The reality of this economy is that human interaction is a legacy cost. Harvard has simply been brave enough to print that truth in the syllabus. If you can’t see the genius in paying a premium to be ignored by an algorithm, you probably aren’t cut out for the C-suite anyway. Now, if you’ll excuse me, my A.I. avatar is scheduled to autonomously reject my co-founder's request for equity.