Empowering Instructors | Supporting Excellence
Generative AI-Powered Role Playing
Instructional Insights | by Rachael Webb, Ph.D.
Published November 10, 2025
Generative AI offers a powerful avenue for enhancing disciplinary learning through immersive role-playing exercises. By engaging with AI-powered simulations, students are able to practice navigating complex, real-world conversations within the context of their field. These low-stakes, high-impact scenarios allow learners to build essential skills like resiliency, confidence, and critical problem-solving, all while reinforcing disciplinary knowledge in authentic, applied ways. Structured AI interactions not only prepare students for difficult dialogues they may encounter professionally but also enable them to rehearse responses in a safe, judgment-free space.
This Innovation Insight introduces practical strategies for developing role-play activities powered by generative AI, with an emphasis on effective prompt design. Faculty will learn how to script AI personas, add context, and set guiderails to promote deeper student reflection and adaptive thinking. Whether used to simulate a difficult patient, a skeptical stakeholder, or an emotional peer, AI role-play supports experiential learning and offers an accessible entry point into performance-based pedagogy.
- Design structured role-play scenarios using generative AI to simulate discipline-specific conversations that build student confidence and critical thinking.
- Apply key prompt design principles to create engaging and realistic AI-powered interactions.
- Evaluate the impact of AI-based role-play activities on student learning, including skill development in communication and problem-solving, in a low-stakes environment.
Guiding Questions for This Insight
- How can role-playing with generative AI support learning outcomes in my discipline?
- What academic scenarios would benefit from simulated conversation in my teaching context?
- In what ways can these AI-driven role-plays foster student resilience and reflective practice?
Using Generative AI to facilitate role-playing scenarios teaches students resiliency, confidence, and problem solving.
An interesting study recently published in Forbes found that 37% of managers would rather hire AI than offer jobs to Gen Z candidates. This is because GenZ is often seen as lacking resiliency and the ability to take criticism well. Thus, students need to build their confidence handling difficult conversations. Role Playing with Generative AI can help. It gives students an opportunity to engage in challenging conversations in a low-stakes environment.
When starting a role-play scenario with a GPT, it’s important to craft your prompt carefully. Traditional prompts will just render generic, lifeless text. While the output might be fine, it’s ultimately forgettable. Banal statements won’t promote learning and students won’t remember how to respond when in a real-life scenario.
Role-play prompts, on the other hand will engage the student in a conversation wherein the student has to provide authentic thoughtful answers.
There are three things you must remember to include when crafting a role-playing prompt.
First, give the GPT a persona. The large language model doesn’t know how to “act” unless you tell it. A statement like you see on the screen clearly articulates what role you expect your chatbot to play so it can get into character.
Second, provide context. Explain what impetus necessitated the conversation you and the chatbot are about to have. Is the chatbot a customer seeking more information about a product? Is the chatbot a superior displeased with an employee’s performance on a certain task? Is the chatbot a parent angry to hear that their child has recently been diagnosed with a condition? Context gives the chatbot a “back story” to drawn on.
Lastly, clearly explain the task. Do you want the chatbot to ask one question at a time? Continue the conversation until you provide a stop word? Critique or challenge your answers to its questions? Ask follow-up questions of you? The chatbot can handle all of this but you need to include it in the task so it knows how to structure the conversation you’re about to engage in.
Though not necessarily required, it can be instructive to request a summary of your interactions when the conversation ends. You can command the chatbot to highlight ways you could have responded better in the generated summary.
More advanced students can even elevate their role-playing by using an LLM’s voice mode.
There are examples of well-structured role-play prompts linked in the Resources.
Carefully structured prompts will result in a more meaningful role-playing experience.
Role-playing promotes learning because, as Marc Watson in The Chronicle so eloquently stated: Learning requires friction. Students need to be placed in challenging environments where they have to apply what they have learned in real time. Using generative AI as a role-playing partner lowers the stakes for the student but still provides much needed practice.