AI-first company

Company case

Duolingo: 148 new language courses in about a year, after 12 years for the first 100

Duolingo replaced a slow, manual way of writing language courses with one built around AI. It launched 148 new courses in under a year, after taking about 12 years over its first 100. The same week, its chief executive told all staff what “AI-first” would mean for contractors, hiring and headcount.

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Outcome Company-reported result

The company published the figures itself.

In the guide Mid-market companies

At a glance

Company
DuolingoLanguage-learning app
Size
Mid-market (250–999 employees) Duolingo reported approximately 830 employees at 31 December 2024 in its annual report.
Where and when
United States. 2024 – April 2025.
Who produced the figures
The company itselfThe figures are Duolingo’s own, from a press release, a letter to shareholders and its annual report.

What they did

A language course on Duolingo is a large body of exercises, and each course teaches one language to speakers of another. The company says that building a single course from scratch used to take a small team years.

It changed the process in two ways. First, its experts now build one high-quality base course, which is then adapted for dozens of languages. The company calls this “shared content”. Second, generative AI is used to create the content and to check it. The company’s head of learning design says this lets the experts “focus our expertise where it’s most impactful”.

On 28 April 2025 the chief executive, Luis von Ahn, sent an email to all staff, and the company published it. It said Duolingo was “going to be AI-first”. It set out what that meant:

  • The company will “gradually stop using contractors to do work that AI can handle”.
  • AI use will count in hiring and in performance reviews.
  • “Headcount will only be given if a team cannot automate more of their work.”
  • Most functions will have their own projects to change how they work.

The email also said the company “will remain a company that cares deeply about its employees”, that the change “isn’t about replacing” them, and that staff would get “more training, mentorship, and tooling for AI in your function”.

The numbers

  • 148 new courses launched on 30 April 2025, built in less than a year. This more than doubled what the company offered.
  • About 12 years was what the first 100 courses had taken, the chief executive said.
  • About 830 employees at the end of 2024, more than 380 of them engineers.
  • AI also added cost. Gross margin fell from 73.0% to 71.1% in the first quarter of 2025. The company put this mainly on the cost of generative AI in its top subscription tier, where AI runs features such as spoken conversation practice.

What the case shows

  • The gain came from a new process. The company says so itself: “Making minor tweaks to systems designed for humans won’t get us there.”
  • A mid-sized company did this. It had about 830 staff, and it started with the one process that limited its growth.
  • The company accepted a trade-off on quality. The email says it would “rather move with urgency and take occasional small hits on quality than move slowly and miss the moment”.
  • AI in the product is a running cost. Speed in making content and the cost of AI features for customers showed up in the same quarter’s accounts.
  • Staff were told plainly. The email named contractors and headcount, and did not leave people to guess.

What this says about the practices

Practices the company applied

Sources

  1. Duolingo (30 April 2025). Duolingo Launches 148 New Language Courses. Press release, as carried by Nasdaq. nasdaq.com
  2. Duolingo (1 May 2025). First quarter 2025 shareholder letter, filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. sec.gov
  3. Duolingo (28 April 2025). All-hands email from chief executive Luis von Ahn, published by the company on LinkedIn. linkedin.com
  4. Duolingo (28 February 2025). Annual report for 2024 (Form 10-K), filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Source of the employee count. sec.gov