The buyer will see you now

Students in Marketing 310 are logging dozens of sales call reps — not just with classmates, but with a Flyer-developed AI tool that talks back.

Using Copient.ai, students move through the stages of a sales call — the opening, needs identification, presentation, objections and closing — while the system responds in real time as the buyer. After each attempt, it delivers targeted feedback with transcript examples and suggestions for improvement. Students can retry immediately, up to seven times per module.

Scott Friend, professor and the R. Lucille and Norman M. Schaefer Chair in Marketing, said the repetition helps reduce “the high level of uncertainty” he previously observed before the final 15-minute, in-person role play, when students had not yet fully developed fluency with the sales process. With 40 students in the course, practice and feedback are essential.

“I’ve gone from two role plays to 30 role plays,” he said. “The increase gives students the reps that they’re really after.”

The tool also carries a UD connection: Co-founder Michael Burke ’88 is a Flyer, as are his wife, Tracy Ruder Burke ’89, and his father, Michael David Burke ’61, a member of the University’s first MBA cohort.

“It’s a really wonderful, kind of fortuitous event where the technology in the classroom was developed by a Flyer, and now it’s really benefiting our students.”

Burke, a mechanical engineering graduate, built his career during the dot-com era, when startups were still uncommon. His interest in AI accelerated after the release of early ChatGPT models, and he and his team developed an internal tool to help their sales staff practice conversations. “It immediately impacted their behaviors in positive ways,” he said.

That success led to the launch of Copient.ai. Today, more than 50 universities use the platform. Some, like UD, use it for sales training. Others use it to help students with negotiation, sales management, professional communication and productive discourse, which Burke says is helping students “facilitate constructive dialogue conversations that help undergraduates practice engaging across differences on difficult, highly charged issues.”

For Makenna Snider, a marketing junior who launched a livestock care company, 4M Magnetic Brushes, with her sisters in high school, the structure mattered. Despite her experience, she had never completed a formal sales call. After learning she’d be practicing with an avatar, she wasn’t sure what to expect. “It was like I was talking to a real person,” she said.

The practice pushed Snider to refine her approach by strengthening her opening and helping her build rapport. “A lot of times, I found it probing for more: ‘What else can you get out?’ Or, ‘How much deeper can you go?’” By the final assessment, she said, “going from the computer screen to the person across the table felt like no difference.”

Friend said, “It’s a really wonderful, kind of fortuitous event where the technology in the classroom was developed by a Flyer, and now it’s really benefiting our students.”

Photograph by Sylvia Stahl

A version of this article appears in print in the Spring 2026 University of Dayton Magazine, Page 43. EXPLORE THE ISSUE — MORE ONLINE