Preply and OpenAI: Personalizing Language Learning with AI

Preply and OpenAI: Personalizing Language Learning with AI

Preply, the world's largest online language learning marketplace, has partnered with OpenAI to integrate AI into both its customer-facing products and internal operations. By combining human tutor expertise with OpenAI's models, Preply aims to increase personalization and reduce administrative burdens for educators.

Lesson Insights: Automated Personalization at Scale

Lesson Insights is the centerpiece of Preply's AI strategy, designed to turn every 1:1 lesson into a structured learning journey. With learner consent, sessions are recorded and transcribed in the Preply Classroom, and OpenAI's APIs analyze the transcripts to generate tailored feedback.

Key Capabilities of Lesson Insights

  • Automated Feedback: Within minutes of a lesson ending, learners and tutors receive a structured report in their chat thread containing:

    • A summary of key lesson topics
    • Grammar corrections and explanations
    • Vocabulary highlights and translations
    • Pronunciation feedback
    • Recommended next steps

  • Integrated Practice: These insights feed directly into Preply’s self-learning exercise engine to generate personalized homework, ensuring that the learning compounds over time rather than treating sessions as standalone events.

User Impact and Adoption Rates

Preply reports high engagement and satisfaction among its user base:

  • Learner Adoption: 75% of English-language learners actively use Lesson Insights.
  • Tutor Adoption: More than 70% of tutors utilize the feature.
  • Retention: Approximately 75% of active learners continue to engage with Lesson Insights more than a year after adoption.
  • Satisfaction: The platform has received a 4.7/5 satisfaction rating from over 300,000 ratings.
  • Product-Market Fit: The feature achieved a 70% product-market fit score.

Internal Operational Transformation

Preply has embedded OpenAI's technology across its entire organization to automate operational processes and maintain brand consistency.

Engineering and Development

Approximately 94% of Preply engineers use Codex and AI coding assistants for debugging, PR reviews, and code generation. This shift allows engineers to focus more on system architecture and solving customer problems rather than routine coding tasks.

Corporate Workflows

Preply deployed ChatGPT Enterprise for over 600 employees across its global offices in New York, Kyiv, London, and Barcelona. Weekly active usage grew from 60% to 95% following company-wide enablement sessions. The company also uses custom GPTs, such as a Brand Voice GPT, to ensure consistent messaging and tone across content creation.

Strategic Implementation Lessons

Preply's leadership emphasizes that AI adoption is a cultural transformation rather than a simple tooling rollout. They highlight three primary strategies for success:

  1. High-Impact Use Cases: Focus on a small number of features with clear user value and measurable impact over numerous low-quality experiments.
  2. Cultural Integration: Treat AI as a company priority reflected in strategy, roadmaps, and objectives to signal that usage is an expectation.
  3. Collaborative Development: Work directly with users—such as tutors—to build datasets and evaluate prompts to ensure high quality.

"It’s not about replacing humans. It’s about augmenting them with new capabilities and also sometimes redefining the essence of the job."

— Dmytro Voloshyn, Co-founder & CTO, Preply

Future Outlook

Preply plans to expand Lesson Insights to create a deeper, long-term understanding of each learner's goals, strengths, and preferences over months of study. The goal is to move away from a one-size-fits-all curriculum toward a learning experience that adapts continuously to the individual. Additionally, the company is exploring agentic development tools to allow more employees to participate in building solutions.

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