How many customers are you willing to lose on your AI investor story?

Duolingo’s AI bet triggered mass uninstalls, yet the app still grew its user base by 40%.

This is an AI branding masterclass:
How the wrong message can invite failure, even when your strategy is a 10/10.

“Duolingo is going to be AI-first”, declared Luis von Ahn, CEO.

The plan:

Replace manual workflows with AI,
Compressing decades of lesson creation into a single year.

Luis was convinced learners wanted more courses, faster:
“We owe it to our learners to get them this new content ASAP.”

Here’s how it actually landed:

• “Day 1042 on Italian, also my last.”
• “I’ve deleted the app and am looking for alternatives.”
• “My friends and I are cancelling our subscriptions.”

Negative comments were piling up so fast, Duolingo had to nuke their entire social media presence,
Erasing 13 years of posts overnight.

For a moment, it looked like they were writing their own obituary.

But it didn’t have to be this way,

Because in reality, the product was better for more learners:

They released 148 new courses in a single year.
(It took 12 years to build the first 100)

Even as many deleted the app in anger, many more installed it:
Daily active users actually rose 40% year-on-year.

And this wasn’t vanity growth - subscriptions surged too:
Revenue jumped 41%, even beating Wall Street estimates by 5%.

The mistake here wasn’t strategy, it was communication.

To me, Duolingo’s announcement sounds more like an earnings call than a love letter to users:

Headcounts and workflows speak to Wall Street.
Customers want lesson quality, variety, and personalisation.

Investors buy narrative. Customers buy experiences.

“AI-first” is just not a story customers care about.

Get the audience wrong, and even the right strategy falls flat.

So next time you’re planning your AI rollout, ask yourself:

Is the story about your customers’ win, or your own achievement?