And, typically CEO’s say things like this to try to scare/get leverage on employees.
The reaction to their AI announcement doesn't feel organic at all with oceans and oceans of content creators flooding feeds with samesy half-deprecating bashes of them using AI.
I think for every person who genuinely was put off, even more either didn't care, or were using ChatGPT for language learning and would try it to see what they mean by an AI-first approach.
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And for anyone who thinks they'd never take that kind of bad publicity on purpose: this is the brand that "killed" their beloved mascot a few months ago and similarly managed to saturate multiple channels with creators bashing them for that.
This is straight out of the "stop hiring humans" playbook.
Duolingo was also growing - both in terms of earnings and number of employees. They can afford some looses.
The app is absolutely gamified, but I've never paid them a dollar, waste about 1.5 minutes a day ignoring ads, and in exchange for nothing I get moderately useful foreign language learning. The gamification keeps me at it, where past study approaches eventually petered out.
The use of AI in this and other tools is inevitable. The CEO certainly oversold it in his initial announcement, but the weird reaction of people stopping using the app because Due Lingo is going "AI first" seems inconsistent. Are people going to stop using Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Nvidia because they're all-in on AI too?
How does any of this matter unless 1. customers stop using this app or 2. all employees quit. Neither one is happening, especially the one where customers leave, because customers are not using this app as a form of charity to fund salaries of contractors.