Facepalm: In a classic example of a CEO admitting he got too carried away on the AI hype train, Duolingo boss Luis von Ahn has confirmed the company will no longer assess employees' performance based on how much they use AI for work tasks.
In April 2025, von Ahn announced plans for Duolingo to become yet another "AI-first" company, meaning more of the technology being integrated into the platform and the eventual elimination of contract workers. This wasn't a first for von Ahn: in January 2024, 10% of Duolingo's contract workers were laid off due to AI adoption.
Another element of this new initiative was to evaluate employees based on their AI use in performance reviews. Duolingo certainly wasn't the first company to go down this path: Meta, Google, Microsoft, Shopify, and others do the same.
But as most people know, shoehorning AI into every aspect of a business can be a bad idea.
Duolingo users' reaction to the AI-first announcement was predictably negative. Duolingo even tried to own its decision using a remarkably ill-conceived Instagram post.
A number of users said they would be deleting the app because of the changes. Like many CEOs who seem oblivious to the public's views on AI, von Ahn said he "did not expect the blowback."
Just a month after his AI embrace, von Ahn backtracked, saying human workers were still needed and he did not see the technology replacing Duolingo employees.
In a recent episode of the Silicon Valley Girl podcast, von Ahn talked about the feedback employees gave regarding AI being tied to performance reviews, with some asking if the company wanted them to use AI for AI's sake. It seems a few weren't sure what was actually being measured, or whether using AI was more important than doing a good job.
"At the end, we backtracked, and we said, 'No. Look, the most important thing in your performance is that you are doing whatever your job is as well as possible. 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,'" von Ahn said.
"It felt like rather than being held accountable for the actual outcome, we're trying to just push something that in some cases did not fit."
Other companies are also discovering that going all-in on AI can backfire. Klarna is one of the most notable examples – having previously been the most vocal AI advocate, the company started hiring humans again last year after it found AI chatbots offered a "lower quality" output.
More recently, Take-Two laid off a portion of its AI team, including its head of artificial intelligence, just two months after publicly saying it would be "actively embracing generative AI."