More and more companies are officially talking about how they’ll integrate AI into their workflows.
After Shopify had sent a memo to employees saying it would become an AI-first company, language learning app Duolingo has sent out a similar missive. Duolingo says that it will gradually stop using contractors to do work that AI can do, and like Shopify, will give teams additional human headcount only if they are unable to automate their work through AI.
“I’ve said this in Q&As and many meetings, but I want to make it official: Duolingo is going to be Al-first,” Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn said in the memo. “Al is already changing how work gets done. It’s not a question of if or when. It’s happening now. When there’s a shift this big, the worst thing you can do is wait,” he added.
“Al isn’t just a productivity boost. 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,” he added.
The memo detailed ways in which Duolingo would implement its AI-first strategy. “We’ll gradually stop using contractors to do work that Al can handle,” the company said. “Headcount will only be given if a team cannot automate more of their work,” it added. Duolingo also said that AI skills would be used while hiring and in performance reviews.
Duolingo did says that this didn’t mean that human employees would be less valued. “Duolingo will remain a company that cares deeply about its employees. This isn’t about replacing Duos with Al. 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. We’re going to support you with more training, mentorship, and tooling for Al in your function,” the memo said.
But it seems hard to imagine how such automation cannot result in major job losses — Duolingo has already said that it’ll gradually phase out contractors and replace them with AI, and won’t give additional human headcount if their jobs can be automated with technology. And while AI is currently good at “repetitive tasks”, it might not be long before it gets better at a whole host of other creative things. And with companies now being vocal about adopting AI in a big way, society will need to quickly come up with new jobs to make sure people whose jobs are impacted by the AI revolution find ways to be productive in the coming years.