Duolingo’s CEO Sparked Backlash Over Performance Reviews — Now He’s Changing Them
Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn altered performance-review metrics after employees raised questions.
Key Takeaways
- Duolingo initially tried to evaluate employees on how much they used AI in their work, as part of an “AI first” strategy announced in April 2025.
- After employees questioned whether they were being pushed to “use AI for AI’s sake,” CEO Luis von Ahn backtracked and removed AI use as a formal performance-review metric.
- Von Ahn said performance should be judged on doing the job “as well as possible,” and that while AI can often help, employees would not be forced to use it when it doesn’t make sense.
In April 2025, Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn made headlines after writing a memo calling the company “AI first.” In the memo, von Ahn announced that the language-learning platform would track employees’ AI use in performance reviews.
Now, a year later, von Ahn is backtracking and rethinking how he measures employee performance. He told the Silicon Valley Girl podcast earlier this month that Duolingo no longer considers AI use in performance reviews.
The change arose after employees started to ask, “Do you just want us to use AI for AI’s sake?” von Ahn explained.
“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 on the podcast.
He felt as though the company was “trying to push something that in some cases did not fit” instead of “being held accountable for the actual outcome.”
The CEO is, however, still sticking to other “constructive constraints” he introduced in the April 2025 memo, including stopping contractor hiring in cases where AI can assume their workload. The memo sparked online backlash, causing von Ahn to later explain in a LinkedIn post that he didn’t believe AI would replace the work his human employees did.
How Duolingo uses AI
On the podcast, von Ahn elaborated on how employees at Duolingo are using AI to become more productive. He said that engineers are leveraging AI tools to help them code new products. Meanwhile, product managers are using AI to make prototypes of apps, which allows for “much better decision-making,” he said.
Von Ahn also mentioned that a few months ago, Duolingo had a day dedicated to vibe coding, or prompting AI to create an app without manually writing a single line of code. Every single person at the company, from engineers to human resources professionals, had to vibe code an app.
Vibe coding has made an impact at the company. One of Duolingo’s latest offerings, a course teaching users how to play chess, arose when two people vibe-coded the first prototype of it, the CEO said. Neither of them knew how to play chess or program, but they managed to use AI to create the whole chess curriculum and a prototype of the app in about six months last year. Now chess is Duolingo’s fastest-growing course, according to von Ahn.
“At this point, we have seven million daily active users that are learning chess,” the CEO said on the podcast.
Von Ahn has led Duolingo for over 15 years and holds a doctorate in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University, according to his LinkedIn. Duolingo had a market capitalization of $4.3 billion at the time of writing.
Key Takeaways
- Duolingo initially tried to evaluate employees on how much they used AI in their work, as part of an “AI first” strategy announced in April 2025.
- After employees questioned whether they were being pushed to “use AI for AI’s sake,” CEO Luis von Ahn backtracked and removed AI use as a formal performance-review metric.
- Von Ahn said performance should be judged on doing the job “as well as possible,” and that while AI can often help, employees would not be forced to use it when it doesn’t make sense.
In April 2025, Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn made headlines after writing a memo calling the company “AI first.” In the memo, von Ahn announced that the language-learning platform would track employees’ AI use in performance reviews.
Now, a year later, von Ahn is backtracking and rethinking how he measures employee performance. He told the Silicon Valley Girl podcast earlier this month that Duolingo no longer considers AI use in performance reviews.
The change arose after employees started to ask, “Do you just want us to use AI for AI’s sake?” von Ahn explained.
Sherin Shibu • News Reporter
Entrepreneur Staff
Sherin Shibu is a business news reporter at Entrepreneur.com. She previously worked for PCMag, Business... Read more
