Technology and work

Duolingo will replace collaborators with artificial intelligence, language teachers at risk?

The announcement by the CEO of the app Duolingo that he wants to replace his employees with AI worries the future of the profession

by Chiara Ricciolini

1 May 2025

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Key points

From Duolingo to Shopify, work is less and less necessary
New Margins: the risks of AI

3' min read

On their feast day, workers today are plagued not only by the scourge of insufficient wages, as our President of the Republic reminded us, but also by the rapid and progressive erosion by artificial intelligence of available jobs. In the field of language teaching, this revolution towards a massive cut in human skills seems to have been underway for some time now.

Duolingo, the globally popular language learning app, has announced that it will gradually replace external employees with artificial intelligence systems. The decision was announced by CEO Luis von Ahn in a letter addressed to employees and published on LinkedIn.

'We will gradually stop using external employees for work that can be done by AI,' reads the first point of the new strategic plan, which aims to transform Duolingo into an 'AI-first' company. The transition will have immediate effects: automation will replace human labour in an increasing number of operational functions.

Many users, underneath the post, commented indignantly on the decision, announcing their willingness to unsubscribe from the app.

From Duolingo to Shopify, work is less and less necessary

Von Ahn is not the only one going down this road. At the beginning of April, Tobi Lütke, CEO of Shopify, also called on Shopify in a letter published in X in which he reiterated the importance of AI for the company and urged corporate teams to justify requests for new resources, demonstrating why the same tasks could not be performed by artificial intelligence.

The market for apps to learn languages through AI is expanding rapidly. In addition to Duolingo, solutions such as Memrise, Speak, TalkPal AI, Replika and, in its paid version, even ChatGpt allows interactive dialogues with real-time corrections are spreading.

But the announcement by the CEO of Duolingo goes one step further. The letter to employees states that AI will be integrated into recruitment processes and performance evaluations.

New Margins: the risks of AI

This enthusiasm of CEOs and entrepreneurs towards the use of artificial intelligence is not without risk, not only in terms of job losses. It must be remembered that Large Language Models do not have an understanding of the truth: they generate content based on probabilistic calculations of the data they have been trained with. This can lead to systematic errors and the reproduction of pre-existing biases. The case of Amazon is emblematic: in 2018, the company had to abandon an automated personnel selection system that penalised female candidates, having learned discriminatory patterns from predominantly male resumes.

But companies seem increasingly aligned in the need to make artificial intelligence central to their business models. Von Ahn himself writes in the letter that 'without artificial intelligence it would take decades to adapt our teaching materials to more students. We have a duty to provide this content as soon as possible'.

According to the new plan, each business function of the app will be called upon to redefine its operating methods in an automated way.

"Change can be scary," the CEO explains, "but it will be a big step forward for Duolingo. It will help us better fulfil our mission and stay at the forefront of the use of this technology'. The company points out that AI will not replace teachers altogether, but will be integrated to expand and speed up the educational offering.

On the day dedicated to the achievements of workers, born out of the protests in the factories during the Industrial Revolution, concern remains about the human price of the new revolution that has overtaken humanity: that of intelligent machines.