Duolingo is Going “AI-First”

Duolingo posted an internal email from its CEO stating that the language learning firm will replace contractors with AI.

“I want to make it official: Duolingo is going to be Al-first,” Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn writes in the “all-hands” email. “Al is already changing how work gets done. It’s not a question of if or when. It’s happening now. When there’s a shift this big, the worst thing you can do is wait.”

Von Ahn says the shift is similar to the mobile-first strategy the firm adopted in 2012, at a time when “others were focused on mobile companion apps for websites.” That foresight helped Duolingo win the 2013 iPhone App of the Year award, he says, unlocking “the organic word-of-mouth growth that followed.”

For the AI platform shift, von Ahn says Duolingo will gradually stop using contractors to do work that Al can handle, and it will give teams additional (human) headcount when they can show that it’s impossible to automate more of their work. Duolingo will also use AI in hiring and performance reviews, and employees will be trained to use AI to “fundamentally change how they work.”

“Al isn’t just a productivity boost,” he writes. “It helps us get closer to our mission. To teach well, we need to create a massive amount of content, and doing that manually doesn’t scale. One of the best decisions we made recently was replacing a slow, manual content creation process with one powered by Al. Without Al, it would take us decades to scale our content to more learners. We owe it to our learners to get them this content ASAP.”

To be clear, the “slow, manual content creation process” he notes means “human-made.” Von Ahn assured the employees who were still around to receive this email that their jobs were not in jeopardy, that Duolingo would not replacing them with AI. Instead, he wants them “to focus on creative work and real problems, not repetitive tasks.” Duolingo will support employees with with more training, mentorship, and AI tooling, he said.

I’ve been using Duolingo since late 2014–and I recently passed a two-year daily usage streak, my second-longest to date–and it’s fair to say that the impact of AI on this service is obvious and mostly positive, with tons of new content being added regularly. But it’s difficult to believe that there isn’t a future in which the company uses AI to replace employees, too. And that the CEO at that time will cite similar efficiencies for that change too.