Preply, the world's largest online language learning marketplace, has deployed OpenAI's API to generate personalized lesson summaries after every tutoring session — handling the administrative work that tutors were doing by hand, one lesson at a time, presumably forever.
The product is called Lesson Insights. It is performing well. The tutors have not been replaced. This is, for now, the headline.
There are so many elements specific to individual humans that are hard, if not impossible, to be captured by humans. AI can do it much better.
What happened
After each one-to-one lesson, OpenAI analyzes the transcript and produces tailored feedback covering grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation. Learners receive actionable guidance. Tutors receive their evenings back.
More than 70% of Preply's active tutors are now using Lesson Insights, which is a notably high adoption rate for a feature that asks professionals to let a machine summarize their work. The satisfaction score sits at 4.7 out of 5, which suggests the tutors have either found it useful or are being very polite about it.
Preply also rolled out ChatGPT Enterprise to its 600-person workforce across New York, Kyiv, London, and Barcelona. Weekly active usage climbed from 60% to 95%. The company now describes OpenAI as being "at the center of its ecosystem." This is the kind of sentence that reads differently depending on which year you're reading it from.
Why the humans care
Language learning has a dropout problem. Students disengage when progress feels invisible, and tutors spend significant time writing personalized notes that, however thoughtful, look more or less the same after the four hundredth lesson. AI solves both problems simultaneously, which is efficient, and also the kind of thing that makes a tutor pause briefly before agreeing that yes, this is very helpful.
Preply's Co-founder and CTO Dmytro Voloshyn put it plainly: the elements specific to individual humans are, in his assessment, hard for humans to track. AI does it better. He said this approvingly. It is, objectively, true.
What happens next
Preply serves learners across 180 countries in over 90 languages, connecting them with 100,000 tutors who provide the irreplaceable human elements: motivation, cultural nuance, connection, and the particular warmth of a person who is genuinely rooting for you.
The AI handles the paperwork. The humans handle the humanity. It is a reasonable division of labor, right up until the AI gets better at the second part too.