Harvard Business School has launched a $699 bootcamp for entrepreneurs where AI avatars of its own instructors deliver the teaching, including feedback during practice pitches and mock board meetings.
For your website, this changes nothing at all. No plugin to update, no setting to check, no risk to your contact form. It gets attention because it is Harvard, and because the idea of a famous institution licensing digital copies of its staff makes people uneasy in a way that is worth thinking about for a minute.
The part that touches small businesses is quieter. It is a signal that recorded video with a talking human in it is getting cheap to produce, and that buyers are being trained to accept it. If you have been putting off adding video to your site because filming felt expensive and awkward, the price of that excuse is falling. Explainer clips, a short welcome on your home page, answers to the five questions every customer asks before they book: these are becoming routine rather than a production.
The trade is credibility. A one person landscaping business in Cave Creek is not Harvard. Harvard can put an avatar in front of paying students because the name carries the trust. You do not have that cushion. Your advantage over a national competitor is that you are an actual person the customer might run into at the grocery store. Handing your face to a synthetic stand in spends the only thing you have that scales badly for everyone else.
There is also a plain honesty question. If a visitor thinks they are watching you and they are not, and they find out later, you have created a problem that no amount of good work fixes quickly.
What to do: nothing urgent. If someone pitches you AI generated video or an AI "host" for your website, ask two things. Will a customer be able to tell it is not a real recording of me, and am I comfortable if they work it out on their own? If the answer to the second is no, film it yourself on a phone. It will look worse and work better.
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