Duolingo will only allow its teams to hire new people if they can prove the work cannot be automated with artificial intelligence as part of the language learning giant’s “AI-first” mandate.

The company is now one of several tech giants to have placed a major emphasis on the transformational capability of AI and either constrained hiring or cut jobs to focus more on automation.

In an email to staff that was also posted on LinkedIn, Duolingo co-founder and CEO Luis von Ahn said the move to being “AI-first” would require a significant rethink as “making minor tweaks to systems designed for humans won’t get us there”.

“In many cases, we’ll need to start from scratch,” Ahn said in the email.

“We can’t wait until the technology is 100 per cent perfect.

“We’d rather move with urgency and take occasional small hits on quality than move slowly and miss the movement.”

As part of these changes, Duolingo will “gradually stop using contractors to do work that AI can handle” and look for AI use in hiring and performance reviews.

He emphasised that the company still “cares deeply about its employees” and the move “isn’t about replacing Duos with AI”.

Instead, it’s about “removing bottlenecks” so that its workers can “focus on creative work and real problems, not repetitive tasks”.

“It helps us get closer to our mission,” Ahn’s email said.

“To teach well, we need to create a massive amount of content, and doing that manually doesn’t scale.

“One of the best decisions we made recently was replacing a slow, manual content creation process with one powered by AI.

“Without AI, it would take us decades to scale our content to more learners.

“We owe it to our learners to get them this content ASAP.

“When there’s a shift this big, the worst thing you can do is wait.”

AI-first tech firms

The Duolingo shift comes soon after e-commerce giant Shopify announced a similar policy around AI.

For Shopify, teams that want to request more headcount or resources will need to first show “why they cannot get what they want done using AI”.

“What would this area look like if autonomous AI agents were already part of the team?” Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke told employees in early April.

“This question can lead to really fun discussions and projects.”

The Shopify CEO went on to say that “reflexive AI usage” within the company is now a “baseline expectation” and using AI effectively is a “fundamental expectation” of all employees at the company.

Australian tech giant Canva earlier this year laid off most of its technical writing team amid an expanded use of AI.

Ten of the company’s 12 technical writers have reportedly been made redundant this year.

It’s understood that Canva does not view the job cuts as a direct result of its wider use of AI.

AI in the public service

AI is actively reshaping workplaces, automating tasks and threatening job security for many Australians.

According to the Social Policy Group, if the rate of AI adoption in Australia continues, one-third of the entire workforce could experience a period of unemployment by 2030, with workers needing to embrace continuous learning to brace for this.

The Australian Public Service has also toyed with the use of generative AI tools within the workforce, with a trial of Microsoft’s Copilot tool encountering some “adoption challenges” and concerns among employees of its impact on jobs and the environment.

The Australian National Audit Office recently found that at least 20 government entities were using AI last year without any policies in place governing its use.

Most of these agencies were using the technology to help with research and development, IT systems administration, and data and reporting.

Centrelink also trialled AI models to predict fraudulent welfare claims and which debts to prioritise recovering, but has revealed few details about these.