How Preply combines AI and human tutors to personalize learning

Preply ⁠ (opens in a new window) is the world's largest marketplace for online language learning, connecting more than 100,000 expert tutors with learners across more than 180 countries. Through personalized one-to-one instruction across more than 90 languages, Preply’s mission is to make high-quality language education accessible to anyone, anywhere.

Language learning is fundamentally human. It requires conversation, confidence, motivation and cultural understanding. While Preply tutors provide irreplaceable energy, motivation, cultural nuance, and human connection for learners, they also face repetitive tasks: writing personalized plans and lesson notes. Students, meanwhile, often require a clear sense of progress to keep engagement high.

Preply saw an opportunity to use AI to strengthen—not replace—the relationship between tutors and learners. The result was Lesson Insights, an OpenAI API-powered experience that transforms every lesson into a personalized learning journey.

“It’s the topic I’m most excited about,” says Dmytro. “Codex helps us write code with a speed that was previously unseen. With such a powerful tool, engineers can focus more on architecture in the system as a whole and solving customers' problems.”

The company has also embraced Codex as a core part of its engineering workflow.

Pick high-impact use cases: It’s better to go deep on a small number of features with clear user value and measurable impact than many experiments that don’t reach quality

Build partnerships: Work with organizations that can support rollout, develop teams’ knowledge, and collaborate on how to solve customers’ problems in the best way

AI is also transforming how Preply builds products internally. As agentic development tools become increasingly capable, more employees can participate in building solutions—not just consuming them. That means faster innovation, broader experimentation, and greater support for learners and tutors around the world.

After each 1:1 lesson, OpenAI analyzes the lesson transcript and generates tailored feedback across grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation. Learners receive actionable guidance. Tutors spend less time on administrative work. And both gain a richer understanding of progress over time.

To find the right technology partner, Preply evaluated multiple AI models across language-learning tasks. OpenAI consistently delivered strong performance, while providing the speed, reliability, and production readiness needed to serve learners at global scale.

“We decided to partner with OpenAI because it provides state-of-the-art models for us, which solve problems for our customers,” says Dmytro Voloshyn, Co-founder & CTO, Preply. “It’s now at the center of our ecosystem and how we operate as a company.”