Learning From and With AI: Duolingo’s Zan Gilani

**Sam Ransbotham** (0:02)
Learning a new language is a complex process.
One app company looks to AI to help with personalization, context, and motivation. Learn more on today's episode.

**Zan Gilani** (0:14)
I'm Zan Gilani from Duolingo, and you're listening to Me, Myself, and AI.

**Sam Ransbotham** (0:19)
Welcome to Me, Myself, and AI, a podcast on artificial intelligence and business. Each episode, we introduce you to someone innovating with AI.
I'm Sam Ransbotham, Professor of Analytics at Boston College. I'm also the AI in Business Strategy guest editor at MIT Sloan Management Review.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (0:38)
And I'm Shervin Khodabandeh, senior partner with BCG and one of the leaders of our AI business. Together, MIT SMR and BCG have been researching and publishing on AI since 2017, interviewing hundreds of practitioners and surveying thousands of companies on what it takes to build and to deploy and scale AI capabilities and really transform the way organizations operate.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:05)
Welcome. Today, Shervin and I talk with Zan Gilani, principal product manager at Duolingo.
I'm personally pretty excited about today's episode because Duolingo is in a really interesting position. In a lot of our show, we end up talking about how organizations are using AI to augment or to improve human decision making. And that's great. But Duolingo goes further and focuses on how humans are learning with AI, personalized education at scale, which is something that appeals to me.
Anyway, that's enough from me. Let's hear it from Zan. Zan, thanks for joining us.

**Zan Gilani** (1:38)
Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:40)
Zan, first, can you give us an overview of Duolingo and the company and what your role is?

**Zan Gilani** (1:46)
Absolutely. Duolingo is basically an app that teaches languages. We teach 40 plus languages right now. Most of those people, by the way, are learning English.
And most of our learners are also learning on mobile phones, so Android and iOS devices. And we are the most downloaded and the most used educational app there is, languages and otherwise. We have around 16 million DAU or daily active users and 40 plus million monthly active users as well.
And I've been at the company just coming around to eight years where I am a principal product manager for the experimental AI team. My primary role is leading this team that is working to teach more effectively using generative AI. And also more broadly, I have the company set up for success when it comes to generative AI.
One of the main use cases we have now specifically for generative AI is a new subscription tier. Duolingo is a freemium product. The mission is to provide the highest quality education possible, make it accessible to as many people. All you need is an Internet connection. So we have this free version of the app, which is what most people are on. That's really good. Most people at the company spend time on that. And then we have subscription tiers. And we recently just launched a new AI-powered subscription tier called Duolingo Max. And I'm happy to go into the features as well.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (3:12)
So experimental AI, it's sort of like your R&D lab, if you will?

**Zan Gilani** (3:19)
Well, I'd say actually more than half of the company is working on R&D broadly, kind of all of the people who work on product. And within the folks who work on learning or teaching effectively, you could think of it as a lab, yes.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (3:35)
Great. Maybe for our audience, you could list the variety of use cases, or places that AI is being used. I mean, of course, from the obvious one, personalization and gamification that a lot of the apps have. But just tell us how AI is being used.

**Zan Gilani** (3:53)
Duolingo has been using AI for as long as the app has been around, which is coming up to a decade. In fact, it was founded by a computer science professor, Luis Fanon, at Carnegie Mellon University and his graduate student at the time, Severin Hacker. Right now, it's used in a number of different ways.
On the growth side, for example, a lot of work goes into optimizing notifications. The thing about Duolingo that makes it different from other apps is that it really tries to help you stay motivated. For us, pedagogically, we think that the hardest thing about learning a language is actually staying motivated. Because remember, this is something tough to do. It's especially tough to do by yourself.
On a phone, you know, that's really a tough thing. So notifications and the timing when you get them, the messaging that it has really does affect someone's ability to stick with it in the long term. So we put a lot of effort into machine learning for notifications. We also use it on the content generation side. So we are trying to create useful, appropriate content. We use it there as well. And then in a separate arm of the company, which is the Duolingo English Test, which is basically an English proficiency test that students have to take when going to university, kind of a competitor to the TOEFL or TOEIC or IELTS. Most Americans haven't had to experience this.