Duolingo sent the owl out for a long lunch yesterday while CEO Luis von Ahn took over making bold proclamations. Von Ahn said in an all-hands email, which he also shared to LinkedIn, that Duolingo would be “AI-first.”

What does that mean? The biggest change is that the company will start to phase out contractors for work that can be handled by AI. Von Ahn said this was to overcome human limitations in creating the “massive amount of content” Duolingo needs to scale:

The company will only allow new hires once teams prove they can’t automate the work. And candidates’ facility AI will be evaluated during the hiring process.
The move follows Uber and Shopify, which both said AI will be integral to their companies.

Duolingo employees can also expect their AI use to be graded in their performance reviews.

Big picture: Duolingo has seen explosive user growth since it went public four years ago. Its paid subscriber count grew from just under 2 million in 2021 to over 8 million last year. Von Ahn told employees that despite AI not being perfect, the company would rather move quickly and “take occasional small hits on quality than move slowly and miss the moment.”—MM

This report was originally published by Morning Brew.

Duolingo CEO says he’s getting rid of contract employees and replacing them with AI