Preply and OpenAI: Revolutionizing Language Learning with AI

Preply and OpenAI: A Partnership for Personalized Learning

Preply, the world's largest marketplace for online language learning, has integrated OpenAI's artificial intelligence to transform the educational experience for its users. By utilizing AI-generated lesson summaries, Preply offers personalized feedback and exercises tailored to the specific needs of learners. This initiative aims to enhance student engagement while optimizing tutors' time.

With a community of over 100,000 expert tutors, Preply connects learners in more than 180 countries, providing personalized one-on-one instruction in over 90 languages. Preply's mission is to make high-quality language education accessible to everyone, regardless of their geographical location.

The Importance of the Human Element in Learning

Language learning is inherently a human activity that requires rich interaction through conversation, trust, and cultural understanding. Preply's tutors bring essential energy and human connection, but they are often bogged down by repetitive tasks such as writing personalized lesson plans and notes. Students, on their part, need to track their progress to stay motivated and engaged.

Preply identified an opportunity to use AI to strengthen the relationship between tutors and learners without replacing it. Thus, Lesson Insights was born, a tool that transforms each lesson into a personalized learning journey using OpenAI's API. After each one-on-one lesson, OpenAI analyzes the session's transcription and generates tailored feedback on grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation. Learners receive actionable advice, while tutors spend less time on administrative tasks.

AI Serving Education

To develop this technology, Preply tested several AI models before choosing OpenAI for its performance, speed, and reliability. The company deployed ChatGPT Enterprise to its 600 employees spread across New York, Kyiv, London, and Barcelona, increasing weekly active usage from 60% to 95%. This massive adoption has allowed for the integration of AI into the daily work of teams, thereby facilitating the optimization of internal processes.

A New Era for Lessons

Lesson Insights has become central to Preply's AI strategy. Lessons take place in Preply's virtual classroom, and with learners' consent, sessions are recorded and transcribed. The generation of insights is scheduled a few minutes before the end of the session so that feedback is ready to be reviewed together by the tutor and the student.

In the minutes following the end of a lesson, the learner and their tutor receive a structured and personalized report in their chat thread. This report includes a summary of the main topics covered, grammatical corrections and explanations, vocabulary points and translations, pronunciation feedback, as well as recommended next steps. These insights directly feed into Preply's self-learning exercise engine, generating personalized assignments that transform each lesson into structured and cumulative practice.

Impact on Internal Organization

The use of OpenAI APIs extends throughout the entire Preply organization, optimizing internal processes and supporting teams in their daily tasks. Custom GPTs, such as the Brand Voice GPT, are integrated into daily workflows, helping teams create content that remains consistent with Preply's tone, message, and brand standards.

The company has also adopted Codex as an essential part of its engineering workflow. About 94% of Preply's engineers use Codex and AI coding assistants for code generation, PR reviews, debugging, and accelerating development workflows. By reducing the time spent on routine coding tasks, engineering teams can focus on creating new learning experiences, scaling products in different languages, and delivering value to tutors and learners more quickly.

Results and Outlook

Preply has always had a strong engagement per lesson, but its AI-generated summaries help students become even more motivated. The company reports that most active learners continue to interact with Lesson Insights more than a year after its adoption, with strong feedback from both tutors and students, thereby increasing overall retention.

• 95% weekly active usage of ChatGPT among Preply employees
• 75% of English language learners actively use Lesson Insights, powered by OpenAI APIs
• Over 70% of tutors utilize this feature
• Approximately 75% of active learners continue to engage with Lesson Insights more than a year after its adoption
• Satisfaction rating of 4.7/5 among tutors and students, based on over 300,000 ratings received directly on the platform
• 70% product-market fit score, well above the threshold often associated with strong customer demand

AI as a Force for Good

For tutors like Michelle Garcia Ramos, AI has become a practical teaching assistant—an tool that helps reduce preparation time while enhancing the learning experience. Before Lesson Insights, creating personalized assignments and lesson materials could take hours. Now, much of this work is done automatically, allowing tutors to focus on direct support for students.

Leadership Lessons

• Treat AI as a cultural transformation, not just a tool deployment: Adoption accelerates when leadership establishes a clear strategy, teams are trained in its use, and AI becomes an integral part of daily work.

• Choose high-impact use cases: It is better to focus on a small number of features with clear user value and measurable impact rather than multiplying experiences that do not meet quality standards.

• Establish partnerships: Collaborate with organizations that can support deployment, develop team knowledge, and work together to solve customer problems in the best way.

Tips

• Make AI a priority for the company: Preply's adoption of ChatGPT Enterprise was reflected in its strategy, roadmaps, and goals—signaling that its use was an expectation, not an experiment.

• Invest in training: Structured training, hands-on workshops, and internal sessions have helped teams move from curiosity to practical use.

• Work with users: Preply collaborated with tutors to build datasets, evaluate prompts, and ensure that it maintained high-quality standards.

What Are the Next Steps?

For Preply, the future of language learning is becoming increasingly personalized. The company plans to build on Lesson Insights with experiences that create a deeper understanding of each learner over time—capturing goals, progress, strengths, challenges, and learning preferences over several months of study.

The vision is for a learning experience that continuously adapts around each individual, providing more precise guidance, pacing, curriculum recommendations, and feedback.