Duolingo to replace contract workers with AI in a structural shift

Duolingo has announced that it will be making a “platform shift to AI” and “gradually stop using contractors to do work that AI can handle.” An email from co-founder and CEO Luis von Ahn, shared in a LinkedIn post, stated that being an “AI-first” company now meant that there would be structural changes. 

“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.” 

The educational technology company was already using AI for content creation, which Von Ahn calls “one of the best decisions.” 

“Without AI, it would take us decades to scale our content to more learners,” he added.

Now, the platform will be changing how it works with contractors, use AI in hiring and in performance reviews. Von Ahn also said that “headcount will only be given if a team cannot automate more of their work.”

He also noted that the company cared about their employees and wasn’t looking to replace them but wanted to remove “bottlenecks” so employees could “focus on creative work and real problems, not repetitive tasks.”

Earlier this month, Tobi Lutke, the CEO of Canadian e-commerce website Shopify said that teams wouldn’t be allowed to hire more human resources unless they could prove that the task couldn’t be done with AI.