For many white-collar workers, the use of AI is becoming a job requirement.
But at Duolingo, that’s no longer part of performance reviews, company CEO Louis von Ahn said on the April 10 episode of the “Silicon Valley Girl” podcast.
The CEO said that since the company implemented a strategy to evaluate the use of AI in performance reviews, employees have started asking, “Do we want AI to be used just for AI’s sake?”
“Ultimately we backed out and said no. The most important thing about your performance is that you’re doing your job as well as you can. In many cases, AI can help you with that, but if you can’t do it, I’m not going to force you to do it,” he said.
“Rather than taking responsibility for the actual results, it felt like they were just trying to impose things that didn’t fit in some cases,” he added.
In an April 2025 memo outlining the company’s “AI first” strategy, Von Ahn announced that the company would track employee AI usage in performance reviews. The changes also came with other “constructive constraints” the company said the company would introduce, including requiring the use of AI in hiring and phasing out the use of contractors who take on “jobs that AI can handle.”
After his memo sparked an online backlash, he later clarified on LinkedIn that the company is still hiring at the same rate and doesn’t believe Duolingo employees’ jobs will be replaced by AI.
Duolingo did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for comment outside of U.S. business hours.
Duolingo’s reversal of performance reviews comes as many other companies have introduced policies to encourage and track employees’ use of AI.
Business Insider exclusively reported in March that Meta is setting goals for how much some employees should use AI tools. Meanwhile, Google’s non-technical employees are expected to use AI in their workflows, and in some cases it could be incorporated into performance reviews, people told Business Insider’s Hugh Langley.