Duolingo To Go 'AI First', To Replace Contract Work With Artificial Intelligence

Duolingo will be replacing contractors with artificial intelligence as the company will be going "AI first", Chief Executive Officer Luis von Ahn said on Tuesday.

The firm's Linkedin account made a post that shared a screenshot of the CEO's "all-hands email". The e-mail said the organisation would be retooling its operations for AI integration and, in many cases, it would have to "start from scratch".

"We're not going to rebuild everything overnight, and some things — like getting AI to understand our codebase — will take time," von Ahn said in his e-mail.

This change would also affect how Duolingo will engage with its employees. As mentioned earlier, the company behind the world's most widely used language learning application will be doing away with all contract work that AI can already take care of.

Moving forward, those that work at Duolingo will be expected to use AI in their work, which will be one of the criterion through which the company will evaluate their performance.

The firm will only hire new employees if its existing team cannot 'automate more of their work'. The company will also implement targeted initiatives that will fundamentally alter core processes across operations as a part of the AI-focused shift.

Maximising speed of operations was the main reason given behind the shift as stated by von Ahn. He cited manual content creation processes as "slow" and said that they had a "massive amount of content" that would not "scale manually".

"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," von Ahn said.

Duolingo is not the only company to run after the AI train. It's management decisions regarding how AI will dictate its work place are similar to Shopify's recent mandates for its modus operandi.

CEO Tobias Lutke made a post on X on April 7, stating that employees will have to justify why they will need more hires instead of using AI to augment their existing productivity.

"Before asking for more headcount and resources, teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI. What would this area look like if autonomous AI agents were already part of the team? This question can lead to really fun discussions and projects," Lutke wrote.

This increasing shift towards AI may significantly shape workforces. According to Microsoft's Work Trend Index report published on April 23, one in three (33%) business leaders are considering layoffs or "headcount reductions" when taking AI into consideration.

But conversely, the World Economic Forum also reported in the 2025 edition of its 'Future of Jobs Report' that AI may create 170 million new jobs while replacing 92 million existing jobs.

Duolingo stated that it is not looking to replace its employees with AI and will provie training, mentorship and tooling for AI in their employees' operations.

"This isn't about replacing Duos with AI. It's about removing bottlenecks so we can do more with the outstanding Duos we already have. We want you to focus on creative work and real problems, not repetitive tasks," the e-mail said.