Duolingo Is Now an AI First Company 

In 2012, Duolingo took a risky but calculated bet on being mobile-first, a decision that helped it win iPhone App of the Year and drive organic global growth. Today, CEO and co-founder Luis von Ahn is making another decisive move which is reorienting the entire company around artificial intelligence.

In an all-hands memo posted on Duolingo’s LinkedIn page, von Ahn announced that Duolingo will become an “AI-first” company. He made it clear that the shift is immediate and non-negotiable: “AI is already changing how work gets done. It’s not a question of if or when. It’s happening now.”

Von Ahn stated that minor tweaks to human-designed systems are not enough. In his words, “Making minor tweaks to systems designed for humans won’t get us there.” Instead, Duolingo will rethink its internal processes entirely to prioritize automation.

The changes outlined by von Ahn include gradually stopping the use of contractors for tasks that AI can handle, evaluating AI proficiency as part of hiring decisions, and incorporating AI adoption into employee performance reviews. New headcount will only be granted if teams can demonstrate that automation cannot achieve the required work, and most functions will be required to launch initiatives that fundamentally change how they operate around AI.

Von Ahn stressed that the decision is not about reducing full-time staff. “This isn’t about replacing Duos with AI,” he wrote. Instead, the goal is to remove bottlenecks and let employees focus on creative work and solving real problems. The company committed to providing additional training, mentorship, and AI tools to support employees in adapting to the new model.

Duolingo’s move follows a similar announcement from Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke, who recently told employees that teams must show why AI cannot accomplish their objectives before requesting additional resources.

Duolingo’s internal shift toward AI is not new. In early 2024, Duolingo laid off approximately 10% of its contractors after accelerating its use of AI-generated content. A similar reduction took place in late 2023. In both cases, the company stated that no full-time employees were impacted and that contractor offboarding was used only after no alternate internal roles could be found.

Von Ahn explained the necessity of this shift by pointing to Duolingo’s core mission: scaling learning content to reach over 500 million users. “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,” he wrote.

Duolingo’s AI adoption is already visible across multiple areas. Machine learning models process approximately 1.25 billion daily user exercises to better understand learner knowledge and engagement patterns. AI provides instant feedback on speech and grammar exercises, helping users improve their language proficiency in real time. In its English Testing system, AI is used to detect cheating during remotely proctored exams, automatically generate and assess test items, grade responses, and review overall performance before releasing scores.

The company’s partnership with OpenAI led Duolingo to become one of the first third-party organizations to officially launch a GPT-4 powered product. Klinton Bicknell, Head of AI at Duolingo, noted that the power of GPT-4 enabled projects that were previously impossible.

Two key GPT-4 features are already live on Duolingo. The first allows learners to interact with AI personas, such as ordering drinks from an AI barista in Paris, to simulate real-world conversations. The second, called “Explain My Answer,” provides users with personalized explanations about why their responses were graded as correct or incorrect, replicating the experience of human tutoring.

Bicknell stated, “We’re really pushing Duolingo closer to our ideal of being everyone’s personalized tutor in ways that we haven’t been able to do before.”

Duolingo has also applied AI to streamline how its lesson data is generated. In a recent interview, von Ahn explained that lesson content used to be partly created by humans, but is now generated mostly by AI. He emphasized that generating content with AI is “a lot cheaper” and “a lot faster” than using human creators, making the shift essential to scaling Duolingo’s offerings efficiently.

Beyond lesson content, AI has even made its way into Duolingo’s public face. During the company’s third-quarter 2023 earnings call, its purple-haired AI chatbot “Lily” opened the call in place of von Ahn, embodying the company’s increasingly AI-centered identity.

The decision to prioritize AI is also consistent with von Ahn’s philosophy about organizational growth. In an interview with The Verge, he said, “I don’t think that a company like Duolingo… needs 100,000 employees. Maybe we’ll get to 5,000, but I doubt we’ll ever get to something like 100,000.” He added that Duolingo’s decision-making hierarchy places quality first, speed second, and budget third, a reversal of the standard corporate approach.

Co-founder Severin Hacker has also reflected publicly that an early mistake in Duolingo’s journey was not hiring senior leaders fast enough, relying instead on fresh graduates from Carnegie Mellon. The new AI-first direction is an intentional pivot toward scaling with technology rather than people alone.

Luis von Ahn is not waiting for perfect technology. “We can’t wait until the technology is 100% perfect,” he said. “We’d rather move with urgency and take occasional small hits on quality than move slowly and miss the moment.”