A founder is once again taking the helm of the language learning app Babbel and wants to steer the Berlin company into the AI era. The boss, Arne Schepker, who has been in office since 2019, decided not to renew his expiring contract. His predecessor Markus Witte steps in again. He wants to look for candidates for the boss position and run the company in the meantime.
Big changes through AI
Witte sees major changes coming to the language learning industry as a result of software based on artificial intelligence. “We can suddenly do a lot of things that we would have liked to do before,” he told the German Press Agency. Among other things, you can draw conclusions from learning data better and faster – and thus adapt to individual learning behavior.
The Babbel co-founder assumes that the company can train existing AI models for its purposes. At least for the next few years, he does not expect artificial intelligence to be able to replace human didactics in the learning process.
Not even the AI developers know what the next generation can do or how quickly development will take place. “The only thing we can do at the moment is to mobilize ourselves so that we are flexible and fast enough,” said Witte.
AI as a replacement for learning languages?
Witte is confident that the new possibilities for simultaneous translation using AI will not replace language learning. That might be enough if you want to take a taxi to the hotel in Shanghai. But it doesn’t work if you really want to have contact with people.
In a strategy change, Babbel does not want to immediately invest all of its income in growth in the future, but instead wants to become more profitable.
Schepker steered Babbel through the Corona period, during which the company grew significantly. Their largest market is the USA, where, among other things, a lot of Spanish is learned.
