Synthesia AI

8 Real Ways Companies Are Using Synthesia in 2026 That Will Genuinely Surprise You

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8 Real Ways Companies Are Using Synthesia in 2026 That Will Genuinely Surprise You

By NivaaLabs Research Team • Published March 28, 2026 •
🗞️ Current as of March 2026: All company examples, statistics, and product features in this article are sourced from Synthesia’s official case studies, published reports, Wikipedia, Bloomberg, and independent research — verified March 2026.

📑 Table of Contents

🎯 Quick Overview

Most people think Synthesia is a tool for making talking-head training videos. And yes — it does that. But what 90% of Fortune 100 companies are actually building with it is far more interesting than a compliance video with an AI presenter. This article covers the real projects: award-winning campaigns, interactive AI simulations, multilingual enterprise rollouts, and use cases that genuinely didn’t exist three years ago.

Companies Using Synthesia 60,000+ — including 90% of Fortune 100 (Zoom, Heineken, SAP, Reuters, BBC, Nike)
Most Surprising Use Case A bank running live AI conversations where tellers practice handling angry customers in real time
Biggest Campaign Built on It Lay’s Messi Messages — 650M+ video combinations, 4.5M sent in 7 months, Cannes Lion winner
Cost vs Traditional Video Roughly 500–2,500x cheaper per finished minute than professional production

Why This Article Exists

Every Synthesia review on the internet follows the same structure. Features list. Pricing table. “Great for training videos.” 4.5 stars. Done.

None of them answer the question that actually matters when you’re evaluating a tool: what are real companies building with this, and what became possible that wasn’t possible before?

Synthesia raised $200 million in early 2026 at a $4 billion valuation — backed by Google Ventures, NVIDIA, Accel, and Kleiner Perkins. Adobe tried to acquire them for $3 billion. They said no. That doesn’t happen because a tool makes decent training videos. It happens because something fundamentally different is being built.

Here are 8 real examples of what that looks like in practice — from a Cannes Lion-winning global campaign powered by five minutes of green screen footage, to a bank that built an AI that argues back at its own employees.

1. 🏆 Lay’s x Messi — 650 Million Personalised Videos From Five Minutes of Footage

This is the project that put Synthesia on the creative industry’s radar — and it came with a Cannes Lions award to prove it.

PepsiCo’s Lay’s brand was a UEFA Champions League sponsor. But sponsoring a sporting event and actually connecting with fans are two different things. Working with digital agency 180Amsterdam and production company UNIT9, Lay’s wanted to tap into something most brands struggle to reach: dark social — the private conversations happening in WhatsApp groups and DMs between friends organising to watch matches together.

The result was Messi Messages. Using Synthesia’s AI technology, fans could visit a dedicated platform, enter a few details about who they wanted to invite to watch the match, and receive a personalised video of Lionel Messi — addressing their friend by name, in their language — which they could share via WhatsApp or email.

The remarkable technical detail: the entire AI Messi was built from just five minutes of green screen footage of the real Messi speaking in Spanish. Synthesia’s AI then enabled him to speak nine languages, address thousands of different first names, and generate over 650 million possible video combinations — in real time, on demand.

📊 The numbers: In its first 24 hours alone, the platform generated 1.43 personalised messages every second. Over seven months, more than 4.5 million messages were sent across 20 countries in up to 10 languages. The campaign won a Cannes Lions Bronze award in 2021 — the first AI-personalised video campaign to do so.

What this demonstrated was something the industry hadn’t fully processed yet: AI video isn’t just about reducing production cost. It’s about enabling a category of personalised, real-time, at-scale video experience that was previously physically impossible. You cannot film Messi saying 4.5 million different personalised messages. But you can generate them.

2. 🏦 The Bank That Built an AI Angry Customer

This is the use case that most cleanly shows what Synthesia 3.0’s Video Agents actually unlock — and it’s genuinely unlike anything that existed in corporate training before.

The scenario: a bank wants to train tellers on handling difficult customer conversations. The traditional approach involves scripted role-play with a manager or colleague, recorded scenarios that feel staged, or classroom training that bears little resemblance to the pressure of a real interaction with a genuinely frustrated customer.

With Synthesia’s Video Agents, the bank built an interactive simulation where an AI avatar plays the role of an angry customer — one that responds dynamically to what the teller actually says. The teller speaks. The AI listens, understands, and responds in character. The conversation adapts in real time. At the end, the teller receives a scorecard: what they handled well, where they lost the customer, what they should do differently.

This is not a branching decision tree with pre-recorded options. This is a live, two-way AI conversation embedded inside a video — something that didn’t exist as a product feature before Synthesia 3.0 launched in October 2025.

💡 Why this matters beyond banking: The same architecture applies to any industry where people need to practice high-stakes conversations: healthcare professionals practising difficult patient conversations, sales teams handling objections, HR managers conducting performance reviews. Video Agents are currently rolling out to Enterprise customers in early 2026.

3. 💼 UBS — When Your Financial Advisor Is an AI Avatar of a Real Expert

Swiss banking giant UBS used Synthesia in 2025 to create something that sits at an interesting intersection of personalisation and scale: AI-powered avatars of their own human financial experts.

The idea is straightforward but the implications are significant. UBS has human financial experts — advisors with deep knowledge and decades of experience. But those people can only be in one place at one time. They can only record one video at a time. And if regulations change, or a product detail updates, those videos become outdated and need to be re-recorded.

With Synthesia, UBS created digital versions of their actual human experts. The expert’s voice, appearance, and delivery style are preserved. The script can be updated, translated, or personalised for different audiences — without the expert needing to re-record anything. The avatar handles it. The human expertise becomes infinitely scalable, linguistically flexible, and always up to date.

For clients watching, the experience is closer to speaking with an expert than watching a generic explainer video. For UBS, the production cost of keeping those videos current drops dramatically.

4. 🍺 Heineken — Training 70,000 Employees Without a Single Film Crew

Heineken operates in over 70 countries. Training 70,000 employees — across different languages, cultures, regulatory environments, and roles — at any kind of consistent quality and pace using traditional video production is not a logistics challenge. It’s a logistics impossibility.

Synthesia changed that calculation entirely. Heineken now uses the platform to create and distribute training videos across its global workforce. A single piece of content can be produced once, translated into dozens of languages with accurate lip-syncing, and distributed to employees across markets — all without a camera, a studio, or a production crew.

When a process changes, a regulation updates, or a new product launches, the video doesn’t need to be re-filmed. The script is updated and the avatar regenerates the relevant section. What previously required scheduling, travel, filming, editing, and post-production now takes hours rather than weeks.

🌍 The language dimension: Synthesia supports 140+ languages with AI dubbing that maintains natural lip sync. For a global manufacturer like Heineken, this isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the entire value proposition — one production workflow, every market, no compromise on quality.

5. 📹 Zoom — AI Video to Train 1,000+ Salespeople

There is a certain irony in Zoom — the video communication company — choosing Synthesia to train its sales team rather than recording traditional video. But it reflects something important about where enterprise video production has landed in 2026: even companies with every tool available to create traditional video find AI-generated content more efficient for certain use cases.

Zoom used Synthesia to create AI video content for training over 1,000 salespeople. The sales training use case is particularly well-suited to the platform: content needs to be updated frequently as products evolve, messaging changes, and competitive positioning shifts. With traditional video, every update is a production event. With Synthesia, it’s a script edit and a regeneration.

For a sales organisation of 1,000+ people operating across time zones, having training content that’s always current — and that can be consumed asynchronously at each person’s own pace — is a meaningful operational advantage.

6. 📡 Sky Italia — 100+ Learning Paths, Launched in Record Time

Sky Italia faced a challenge familiar to any large media company: keeping a distributed workforce trained on constantly evolving content, technology, and processes — without grinding production to a halt every time something changes.

Using Synthesia, Sky Italia launched over 100 new learning paths for their teams. The scale of that output — 100+ distinct video-based courses — gives you a sense of how dramatically the production bottleneck shifts when you remove cameras, studios, and scheduling from the equation. Each learning path can be updated independently, translated for different regions, and distributed instantly through their existing LMS.

The instructional design team that would previously have spent months on ten courses can now produce ten times more content in the same timeframe — spending their energy on what actually requires human intelligence: the curriculum design, the learning objectives, the assessment structure. The video production becomes a near-automated output of that thinking.

7. ✈️ Spirit Airlines — Employee Benefits Videos That Actually Get Watched

This one sounds mundane until you think about the problem it solves.

Benefits communication is one of the most consistently underperforming areas of HR communication in large organisations. Companies produce lengthy PDFs, dense benefit guides, and email summaries that most employees never fully read — with predictable consequences during open enrolment periods when employees make uninformed decisions about their own healthcare and financial planning.

Spirit Airlines used Synthesia to convert their employee benefits documentation into clear, concise video content — explained by a consistent, professional AI presenter who covers exactly what employees need to know, in plain language, in a format people actually engage with. The retention rate for video versus text-heavy documentation is well established: viewers retain significantly more information from video than from reading.

The production cost of keeping these videos current — as plans change, pricing updates, or new options become available — drops to near zero compared to re-filming with live presenters.

8. 🌍 The Multilingual Onboarding Problem — And How Global Companies Are Solving It

This isn’t a single company case study — it’s a pattern emerging across every multinational that has adopted Synthesia, and it may be the most commercially significant use case of all.

Global employee onboarding is expensive, inconsistent, and linguistically fragmented. A new hire in Germany, Brazil, and Japan technically goes through the “same” onboarding — but in practice, the quality, depth, and language of that content varies enormously depending on what local teams have had time and budget to produce.

With Synthesia, the entire onboarding library is produced once in the primary language, then translated and lip-synced into every relevant language automatically. The Brazilian new hire and the German new hire watch the same video — with the same production quality, the same accuracy, and the same tone — in their own language. On day one, not month three when the local team gets around to subtitling it.

📊 Real benchmark: Synthesia’s internal data shows enterprise users producing training videos 90% faster than traditional methods. For a company onboarding hundreds of employees per quarter across multiple countries, that compression of production time is not a marginal improvement — it’s a structural change in what’s operationally possible.

Use Case Impact: Where Synthesia Delivers the Most Value

Based on the real company examples above, here is how Synthesia’s value maps across different use cases — scored on time saved, scale achieved, cost reduction, and uniqueness of outcome (things not possible with traditional production):

🎬 Synthesia Use Case Value Map (2026)

What Synthesia 3.0 Changes for All of This

Every example above was built on Synthesia’s previous capabilities. What launched in October 2025 changes the ceiling of what’s possible considerably.

Video Agents — the headline feature of Synthesia 3.0 — turn video from a one-way broadcast into a two-way conversation. The bank simulation example above is the clearest illustration. But Video Agents can also conduct automated job screening interviews, guide customers through complex product decisions, run interactive compliance checks, and capture data from those interactions to feed back into business systems in real time.

Express-2 Avatars represent the most significant leap in realism since the platform launched. The previous generation of avatars was often described as falling into uncanny valley territory — close enough to human to be unsettling, not close enough to be convincing. Express-2 adds full-body movement, natural hand gestures, and facial expressions that track emotional nuance in the script. Enterprise reviewers consistently note that viewers now ask whether the presenter is a real person.

One-click translation to 80+ languages with naturalised lip-syncing is now available on Enterprise plans — meaning the Heineken and multilingual onboarding use cases described above become dramatically more accessible and faster to execute.

💡 What’s still coming: Video Agents are rolling out to Enterprise customers in early 2026. If you’re on Starter or Creator plans, the feature set you have access to today is the core platform — highly capable, but without the interactive AI conversation layer. The roadmap suggests that capability will filter down to lower tiers over time.

Pricing — What Does This Actually Cost?

PlanPriceVideo MinutesKey FeaturesBest For
Free $0 3 minutes (one-time) 3 free test videos, 9 stock avatars, 1 language Testing the tool before committing
Starter $22/mo (annual) / $29/mo monthly 120 minutes/year (10/mo) 230+ avatars, 140+ languages, personal avatar included (annual), branded templates Freelancers, small teams, occasional use
Creator Custom (contact sales) 360 minutes/year (30/mo) All Starter features + priority rendering, advanced brand kit, collaboration tools Content teams, regular production
Enterprise Custom quote Unlimited Video Agents, 1-click translation to 80+ languages, SCORM export, SSO, dedicated support, brand governance Fortune 100-type organisations, all use cases above
💡 The minute limit reality: The Starter plan’s 10 minutes per month runs out fast if each training video is 3–5 minutes. Plan around this: a single onboarding video covering five topics at 4 minutes each already exceeds the monthly allowance. For teams producing regular content, Creator or Enterprise is more practical. The free plan is genuinely useful for evaluating whether the avatars and quality meet your standard before committing.

Synthesia — Overall Pros & Cons

✅ Pros

  • 230+ hyper-realistic Express-2 avatars — best realism in the category
  • 140+ languages with natural lip-sync — unmatched for global teams
  • Video Agents for interactive, real-time AI conversations (Enterprise, 2026)
  • Trusted by 90% of Fortune 100 — enterprise-grade security (SOC 2, GDPR, ISO 42001)
  • 500–2,500x cheaper per minute than traditional production
  • Personal avatar (your digital twin) included on annual Starter and Creator plans
  • Integrates with major LMS platforms (SCORM/xAPI on Enterprise)
  • Update any video by editing the script — no reshoot required

❌ Cons

  • 10 min/month on Starter — runs out quickly for regular production
  • Video Agents only on Enterprise in 2026 — not available on lower tiers yet
  • Rendering takes 10–15 minutes per video minute — slower than HeyGen
  • SCORM export (for LMS integration) requires Enterprise plan
  • 1-click translation to 80+ languages locked to Enterprise
  • Not designed for creative/emotional storytelling — avatars suit business contexts

Is Synthesia Right for You?

Every use case in this article shares a common thread: a team had something they needed to communicate at scale, across languages, consistently, and faster than traditional production allowed. Synthesia solved that problem — sometimes in ways that were genuinely new, like the Messi campaign or the bank simulation.

The tool is not for everyone. It is not the right choice if you need cinematic quality for consumer-facing marketing, emotional storytelling, or high-production creative content. The avatars are excellent for professional contexts. They are not replacing actors in a brand film.

But if your use case involves any of the following — it’s worth starting with the free plan today:

🔵 Synthesia is a strong fit if you need to:

  • Train or onboard employees across multiple countries or languages
  • Produce video content that needs to be updated frequently without re-filming
  • Scale personalised video experiences (sales outreach, marketing campaigns)
  • Convert text-heavy documentation or help articles into video
  • Build interactive training simulations that respond to learner inputs (Enterprise)
  • Create a digital twin of yourself or a team expert for scalable communication

Start Building With Synthesia

Try Synthesia Free → Book Enterprise Demo →

Free plan includes 3 video minutes — no credit card required. Enterprise demo available for teams needing Video Agents and unlimited production.

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

What is Synthesia used for in 2026?

Synthesia is used for a wide range of professional video production: employee training and onboarding, multilingual content distribution, sales enablement, personalised marketing campaigns, interactive AI simulations (Video Agents), eLearning course production, product demonstrations, and internal communications. Over 60,000 companies use it globally, including 90% of Fortune 100 organisations such as Zoom, Heineken, SAP, Reuters, and Nike.

What are Synthesia Video Agents?

Video Agents are Synthesia’s interactive AI feature — launched as part of Synthesia 3.0 in October 2025 — that enable two-way, real-time conversations within videos. Unlike traditional video, Video Agents can talk, listen, and respond to viewers dynamically. They are used for interactive training simulations, automated job screening, customer guidance, and interactive learning experiences. Video Agents are currently rolling out to Enterprise customers in early 2026.

How much does Synthesia cost in 2026?

Synthesia’s Starter plan costs $22/month on the annual plan or $29/month billed monthly, and includes 120 minutes of video per year (10/month). A free plan is available with 3 minutes of video to test the tool without a credit card. Creator and Enterprise plans are custom-priced. Enterprise unlocks unlimited video minutes, Video Agents, SCORM export, one-click translation to 80+ languages, and SSO.

What was the Lay’s Messi Messages campaign?

Messi Messages was a personalised AI video campaign created by PepsiCo’s Lay’s brand in collaboration with digital agency 180Amsterdam and Synthesia. Fans could generate a personalised video of Lionel Messi addressing their friend by name, in up to 10 languages, across 20 countries — all built from just five minutes of real green-screen footage of Messi. Over 650 million video combinations were available, and 4.5 million messages were sent in seven months. The campaign won a Cannes Lions Bronze award in 2021.

How many languages does Synthesia support?

Synthesia supports 140+ languages for video creation and voiceover. Enterprise plans include one-click translation to 80+ languages with AI dubbing that maintains natural lip-sync — meaning a video produced in English can be automatically translated and delivered with a presenter whose mouth movements match the target language, without any manual dubbing work.

Is Synthesia worth it for small businesses in 2026?

For small businesses with a genuine need for regular video content — product explainers, onboarding materials, customer tutorials — Synthesia’s Starter plan at $22/month offers strong value compared to traditional video production costs. The key consideration is the 10-minute monthly limit: plan whether that’s sufficient for your production volume. For occasional or one-off video needs, the free plan’s 3 minutes is enough to evaluate quality. For teams producing multiple videos per month, Creator or Enterprise will be more practical.

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