Duolingo Aims to Replace Contractors with AI Technology

Duolingo plans to incorporate more artificial intelligence and reduce reliance on human labor. In an email sent to all staff members, co-founder and CEO Luis von Ahn stated that the company aims to “ AI-first. The email was additionally posted on Duolingo’s LinkedIn profile.

According to von Ahn, adopting an "AI-first" approach means the company will focus on slowly cease employing contractors for tasks that AI can manage. He mentioned that they will need to reevaluate many aspects of our work" because “ Making slight adjustments to human-designed systems won't achieve our goal."

As part of this transition, Duolingo will:

Utilize AI more for recruitment processes and employee evaluations.
Approve new hires only when a team genuinely cannot automate the tasks.
Decrease the count of contractors performing tasks that AI can handle.

von Ahn said, “ Duolingo will continue as a company that holds deep care for its staff. He also explained, This isn't about substituting Duos with artificial intelligence. Rather, he stated that the objective is " about removing bottlenecks ” so workers can “ focus on creative work and real problems, not repetitive tasks. ”

He also shared why AI is important for Duolingo’s future. “AI isn’t just a productivity boost,” von Ahn said. “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 AI. Without AI, it would take us decades to scale our content to more learners. We owe it to our learners to get them this content ASAP.”

This statement was made following a comparable message from Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke to his employees. Lütke mentioned that prior to requesting additional personnel or funding, teams should demonstrate “ Why they can't achieve what they want with AI assistance."

You can check out the full statement below: