Duolingo Is Adopting an ‘AI-first’ Approach, Says CEO Luis von Ahn

The CEO of Duolingo has said the company plans to adopt an “AI-first” approach to work.

This means the language learning app is going to “gradually stop using contractors to do work that AI can handle,” according to CEO Luis von Ahn.

The message went out in an email to all staff before being posted to the Duolingo LinkedIn account.

Despite this bold claim, von Ahn was clear to say that, “Duolingo will remain a company that cares deeply about its employees” and that “this isn’t about replacing Duos with AI.”

The focus is to remove what he calls bottlenecks in order to allow employees to focus on more creative work and problems. The idea being to prevent human workers from wasting time on repetitive tasks.

A specific example given in the memo was a recent move to replace slow, manual content creation with AI—something which the CEO claimed would have taken the company years to scale up otherwise.

The statement from von Ahn points out how the wider adoption of AI across the business may work, saying: “Making minor tweaks to systems designed for humans won’t get us there. In many cases, we’ll need to start from scratch.

“We’re not going to rebuild everything overnight, and some things—like getting AI to understand our codebase—will take time. However, we can’t wait until the technology is 100% perfect. We’d rather move with urgency and take occasional small hits on quality than move slowly and miss the moment.”

A similar memo went out recently from the Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke. In this message he made the point of saying that before staff could demand more resources or support, they must first show why they can’t achieve their goals already by using AI.

As pointed out in a recent Decrypt article, AI could represent a lucrative space to work in – short term at least. AI jobs are paying on average 77% more than other jobs, with entry-level paying more than twice the average salary.

Edited by Stacy Elliott.