327 …AI In Workforce – Duolingo = Duolingo Is Going to be AI-First Source: Duolingo via LinkedIn (4/25) AI & Work Evolution = Real + Rapid I’ve said this in Q&As and many meetings, but I want to make it official: Duolingo is going to be AI-first. AI 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. In 2012, we bet on mobile. While others were focused on mobile companion apps for websites, we decided to build mobile-first because we saw it was the future. That decision helped us win the 2013 iPhone App of the Year and unlocked the organic word-of-mouth growth that followed… …AI 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 AI. 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… …Being AI-first means we will need to rethink much of how we work. Making minor tweaks to systems designed for humans won’t get us there…We can’t wait until the technology is 100% perfect. We’d rather move with urgency and take occasional small hits on quality than move slowly and miss the moment. We’ll be rolling out a few constructive constraints to help guide this shift…: • …AI use will be part of what we look for in hiring • AI use will be part of what we evaluate in performance reviews • Headcount will only be given if a team cannot automate more of their work • Most functions will have specific initiatives to fundamentally change how they work… Duolingo Co-Founder & CEO Luis von Ahn in All-Hands Memo on AI – 4/25