- Duolingo CEO says company has scrapped plans to include use of AI in employee performance reviews
- CEO Luis von Ahn admitted the change after significant internal turmoil and pushback
- Employees were concerned that the policy risked prioritizing tool use over actual work results.
Duolingo’s CEO promises that the company will no longer focus performance reviews on how much employees use AI to work. Luis von Ahn has repeated a half-embarrassed mea culpa for his initial enthusiasm in pushing Duolingo toward an AI-first future. AI hasn’t completely left the office, but efforts to measure how much employees use the technology are scaling back to a more pragmatic level.
“In the end, we stepped back and said, ‘No. Look, the most important thing in your performance is that you’re doing your job to the best of your ability. 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 in a new episode of Silicon Valley Girl podcast. “It seemed like, instead of taking responsibility for the actual outcome, we were trying to push something that in some cases didn’t fit.”
Politics trumps practice
The original idea didn’t seem too far-fetched at first glance. If AI is going to transform work, employees should use it and companies should track that usage to ensure they stay up to date.
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Duolingo built on that logic with an internal drive to become “AI first.” The company tested the use of AI as a factor in performance evaluations. But those same employees began to question what exactly was being measured. Was showing that they were using AI wherever possible the same as improving their work? The tools that were meant to help start to look like requirements.
The result, according to von Ahn, was a mismatch between what the company intended and what employees experienced.
AI reset
Duolingo’s withdrawal comes at a time when many companies are facing similar issues. Across the tech industry, there has been a rush to integrate AI into daily work, often accompanied by internal goals or expectations around adoption. What remains unresolved is how to measure success. Counting usage is easy. Measuring the impact is more difficult.
AI is still part of the company’s strategy, but it is no longer an indicator of performance. Now, von Ahn said, the emphasis is back to where most employees expected it to be in the first place. Work is evaluated on quality and results, not on whether a particular tool was used along the way.
AI may be powerful, but it is not universally applicable. There are times when performance improves and times when it does not. Forcing it to reach every corner of a workflow risks flattening that distinction.
Von Ahn has long maintained that AI should enhance human effort rather than replace it, a point he has repeated in several interviews when the company faced backlash for its past messages. Their latest comments reinforce that position, even as they acknowledge that the path to AI integration is not as simple as initial enthusiasm suggested.
The adjustment won’t solve the biggest concerns about how AI is changing work. Even so, any change towards something more sustainable and respectful of humans is a good sign. Even if it’s simply a move from asking employees to demonstrate that they are using the latest tools to ensuring they are taking advantage of them when appropriate.
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