After introducing a new strategy for performance reviews to include evaluations of how effectively workers use AI, Duolingo founder and CEO Luis von Ahn said employees started questioning the decision. And due to the pushback, Duolingo has reversed its decision on using AI as a performance metric.
Employees had asked if they were simply using AI for AI’s sake. “At the end, we backtracked, and we said, ‘No, look. The most important thing in your performance is you are doing whatever your job is as well as possible,’” von Ahn said in a recent episode of the Silicon Valley Girl podcast.
“A lot of times AI can help you with that, but if it can’t, I’m not going to force you to do that,” he added. “It felt like, rather than being held accountable for the actual outcome, we were trying to push something that in some cases did not fit.”
It’s not the first time the company has backtracked on its AI policies. Last April, von Ahn announced that Duolingo would become an “AI-first” company, even urging teams against hiring more employees unless they could not automate their work. With the use of artificial intelligence tools, Duolingo was able to introduce 148 new language courses. But a week and some major social media backlash later, von Ahn walked back those comments and wrote in a LinkedIn post that he doesn’t view AI as a replacement for Duolingo employees.
In the recent podcast episode, von Ahn seemed to maintain that belief. “Despite what the internet may think, we’ve never done a layoff here,” he said. “The way I see it, a single employee is just way more productive now than they used to be.”
While von Ahn said that Duolingo employees have become better at leveraging AI, there are some cases in which AI does the opposite of boosting productivity. For example, AI tools are not all that great at generating a large number of narratives, often coming up with things that don’t make any sense, he noted. Additionally, von Ahn said that “it’s not yet the case” that AI can code better than humans. In many instances, the tech doesn’t always work well when it comes to programming. And when mistakes are inevitably made, they take longer to identify and debug.
“The happy path is really fast,” von Ahn said. “But the unhappy path makes it so that it takes so long that you end up spending more effort on that than the time you saved on the other thing.”
Duolingo did not respond to Fast Company’s request for comment.
Duolingo stock (Nasdaq: DUOL) experienced a high point in 2025, but fell earlier this year. While the company crossed the $1 billion revenue mark last year, Duolingo said it expects 25% revenue growth in Q1, to $288.5 million—which falls well below Wall Street estimates. The company announced in a press release that it would announce its first-quarter results on May 4.