Duolingo CEO Louis von Ahn said that recently, the use of artificial intelligence by his company’s employees has ceased to be evaluated as one of the performance criteria.
Duolingo CEO Louis von Ahn said that recently, the use of artificial intelligence by his company’s employees has ceased to be evaluated as one of the performance criteria.
According to Business Insider, he stated this in one of his podcasts.
«Ultimately, we backed down and said ‘no.’ The most important thing is that you do your job as well as you can. Often, AI can help you with that, but if not, I’m not going to force you to do it,» Louis von Ahn said.
According to Duolingo’s CEO, after the company introduced the use of artificial intelligence as a criterion in its performance evaluations, employees began to ask: «Do you just want us to use artificial intelligence for the sake of artificial intelligence?»
So, as Louis von Ahn says, his company abandoned this approach.
«It felt like instead of taking responsibility for the actual outcome, we were just trying to push something that in some cases wasn’t right,» he added.
Earlier, in a memo from April 2025, a year ago, Von Ahn announced that employees' use of AI would be tracked in performance evaluations.
However, he later clarified that he doesn’t see AI truly replacing the work of Duolingo employees after his memo sparked a negative reaction on the Internet.
Duolingo’s move away from AI-based performance measures comes as a number of other tech companies have implemented policies to track AI use among their staff. Meta has set goals for its employees on how they should use AI tools, while Google’s non-technical employees have also been told they are expected to use AI in their work processes.
Recall that previously, the co-founder and CEO of Duolingo announced in an email to employees that the company would stop using contractors to perform work that AI can handle.
