Role Play: what it is and why it matters
Role Play lets your people practice a real conversation with an AI persona inside Learn Content. An AI designer builds the scenario from your description, learners practice it, and every session is scored against a rubric — turning soft-skill practice into measurable evidence.
Note: Role Play requires the role-play configuration to be enabled for your tenant. If you do not see a Role Play block under Content Management, ask the GFoundry team to enable it.
What is a Role Play?
A Role Play is a guided, conversational simulation that lives inside a Learn Content item, alongside other content blocks such as videos, PDFs and quizzes. The learner chats with an AI persona — for example a frustrated customer, a hesitant candidate, or a direct report — and works through a scenario in stages. At the end, the conversation is automatically evaluated against a set of criteria.
It is one of several complementary tools in the Learn module: a video or PDF delivers knowledge, a quiz checks recall, and a Role Play lets people practise the behaviour. See Building Content: Adding Content Blocks for the full set of blocks.
What is it for?
Practice high-stakes conversations in a safe space — sales objections, difficult feedback, support calls, interviews, negotiations.
Turn theory into behaviour: pair a Role Play with the surrounding Learn Content so people apply what they just read or watched.
Generate objective, per-skill evidence instead of relying on a quiz score or self-assessment.
Benefits
Fast to build — describe the scenario in plain language and the AI designer drafts the persona, stages, criteria and skills for you.
Safe and repeatable — learners can restart and retry as often as they need.
Objective evaluation — every session is scored against the same rubric, with feedback per criterion.
Measurable skills — sessions feed the skills engine, producing per-skill evidence that surfaces in Skills Mapping and Gi.
Full visibility — admins review every learner session, its score and its feedback.
How Role Play fits with the other skill sources
Role Play is not the only Learn block that feeds the skills engine. When they are tagged with skills (via Skill Tags), Videos, PDFs and Quiz questions also generate skill signals when a learner completes them. Role Play simply produces the richest signal, because every session is scored against a rubric and turned into per-skill evidence.
A skill that should be strongly validated for someone usually shows up across more than one of these sources. For how each one contributes — and how to tag Videos, PDFs and Quizzes — see How Learn content feeds the skills engine and How role-play sessions feed the skills engine.
How it works, end to end
Design — an admin describes the scenario to the AI designer, which builds the role-play. See Designing a Role Play with the AI Designer.
Test & publish — the admin tries the scenario as a learner would, reviews the evaluation, and publishes. See Testing and publishing a Role Play.
Practice — learners run sessions, get scored, and receive feedback. See The learner experience: practicing a Role Play.
Review — admins review sessions and outcomes; skills evidence accumulates over time. See Reviewing Role Play sessions, evaluations and feedback.