Duolingo is adopting an “AI first” approach for your business, and the language learning platform will reduce their dependence on human contractual workers, since it assigns their responsibilities.
In a memorandum to employees on Monday, the CEO of Duolingo, Luis von Ahn, detailed the official position of “Ai-First” of the company.
“The AI is already changing the way the job is done,” Ahn wrote in a publicly shared email through the Duolingo LinkedIn account. “When there is such a big change, the sausage you can do is wait.”
As part of its AI-First strategy, Duolingo will change the workloads of the AI contractors and “stop using contractors to do the work that AI can handle,” according to email. The company will also reward the use of AI in the hiring of new employees and in the performance reviews of existing employees. In addition, teams will only be allowed to hire new members if the group cannot automatically cannot work.
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Duolingo has eliminated workers hired in favor of AI before. Last year, the company reduced 10% of its contractors after, according to reports, they decided to use AI for translations.
However, Ahn assured the staff in the email that “Duolingo will continue to be a company that deeply cares about its employees”, and that being Ai-First did not try to “replace” workers with AI, but to allow existing employees to concentrate on creative work and resolution of problems on repetitive tasks. The company said it would support staff with training staff, tutoring and AI tools.
CEO of Duolingo Luis von Ahn. Photo of Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
Ahn also explained why Duolingo was choosing to go to AI now. He affirmed in the email that Duolingo bet big on mobile devices in 2012, focusing on creating a mobile application first at a time when mobile applications were mainly companions for complete websites. The movement worked well: the Duolingo application won the 2013 iPhone application with 10 million downloads and grew organically after that. Now, Duolingo has more than 500 million registered users.
“This time, the change of platform is AI,” he wrote in the email.
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Duolingo focuses on AI when using it to create content and power characteristics as video calls, which Duolingo introduced in September. The video call allows students to practice in their destination language through a video chat with a character of the called Lily.
Duolingo is not the first company to recently announce an AI-FIRST strategy. Earlier this month, the CEO of Shopify, Tobias Lutke, told all employees in a memorandum that “using AI Effective is now a fundamental expectation of all in Shopify.” Lutke told Shopify staff that they should maximize what they could do with AI before asking for more additional human resources or employees.
Hello, he also said that Shopify would add questions to use AI to his performance and peer reviews.
Duolingo had a market capitalization of $ 17 billion at the time of writing.
