Duolingo will replace contractors with AI and start assessing whether employees can work with it

Taras Mishchenko - 29 April, 01:26 PM

Duolingo contractors will “gradually stop working on what AI can do on its own,” the company’s co-founder and CEO, Louis von Ahn, wrote in a letter to employees. The statement was part of Duolingo’s announcement of its shift to an “AI-first” strategy. The letter was posted on Duolingo’s official LinkedIn page.

According to von Ahn, "AI-first" means a radical rethinking of many work processes. Among the first innovations, he named:

Phasing out the use of contractors for tasks that AI can automate;
Taking AI skills into account during hiring and in employee performance evaluation;
Allocating new staff only in cases where the team cannot automate more tasks using AI;
Launching special initiatives in each division to fundamentally change the way we work.

At the same time, von Ahn stressed that the company "remains one that cares about its employees." "It's not about replacing Duos (as the company calls its employees) with AI, but about eliminating bottlenecks so that you can focus on creative work and real problems, not on routine," he added.

The CEO recalled that artificial intelligence has already helped Duolingo get closer to its mission of educating millions of people: "To teach well, we need to create a huge amount of content, and the manual process does not scale. One of our best decisions last year was replacing the slow manual creation of materials with an AI platform. Without artificial intelligence, scaling content would have taken decades. Our duty to students is to provide them with these learning materials as quickly as possible."

The letter also mentions that the inspiration for this transformation was Duolingo's 2012 focus on mobile: "Then we saw the future and beat the competition. A similar platform shift is happening now - it's AI."

Duolingo's announcement echoes a similar letter from Shopify CEO Toby Luetke, who in March urged teams to prove why they couldn't complete a task with AI before asking for additional staff or resources.