Duolingo will replace contract workers with AI

Duolingo will “gradually stop using contractors to do work that Al can handle,” according to an all-hands email sent by co-founder and CEO Luis von Ahn announcing that the company will be “AI-first.” The email was posted on Duolingo’s LinkedIn account.

According to van Ahn, being “Al-first” means the company will “need to rethink much of how we work” and that “making minor tweaks to systems designed for humans won’t get us there.” As part of the shift, the company will roll out “a few constructive constraints,” including the changes to how it works with contractors, looking for AI use in hiring and in performance reviews, and that “headcount will only be given if a team cannot automate more of their work.”

van Ahn says that “Duolingo will remain a company that cares deeply about its employees” and that “this isn’t about replacing Duos with Al.” Instead, he says that the changes are “about removing bottlenecks” so that employees can “focus on creative work and real problems, not repetitive tasks.”

“Al isn’t just a productivity boost,” von Ahn says. “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 Al. 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.”

van Ahn’s email follows a similar memo Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke sent to employees and recently shared online. In that memo, Lütke said that before teams asked for more headcount or resources, they needed to show “why they cannot get what they want done using AI.”