Udemy’s Cofounder on How to Avoid Hiring Interns for Inefficient Work

Gagan Biyani, the cofounder of Udemy, said on Monday that AI tools have allowed his new online learning platform, Maven, to rely less on interns to chew through grunt work.

Biyani said in a LinkedIn post that he used to rely on a team of six interns to look for potential instructors they could add to Udemy.

“Back then, our interns would manually scour YouTube and blogs to find potential instructors. They’d write custom outreach messages that I had to approve one by one,” Biyani wrote.

“It was painful and inefficient. I spent as much time training the interns as I got value from their work. But it worked, and we reached thousands of leads to get Udemy off the ground,” he added.

But the rise of AI-powered tools meant that interns were no longer needed for such tasks, Biyani wrote on LinkedIn.

“15 years later at Maven, we now have one person who is more productive than that entire team,” Biyani said, adding that AI allowed the employee to “parse through millions of people and find the exact profile you’re looking for.”

“She’s as productive as that entire intern team (with less oversight from me),” Biyani continued.

Biyani did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

In his LinkedIn post, Biyani cautioned against thinking that you could replace your interns with AI right away.

“You can’t just spin up ChatGPT, hit a button, and solve your prospecting problems. Someone needs to set up the tools, monitor its output, write copy, and train it to improve constantly,” Biyani wrote.

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“It’s like managing hundreds of interns simultaneously – extremely efficient but equally naive,” he added.

Biyani isn’t the only business leader who sees the potential efficiency gains AI can bring to companies.

In April, Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn said in a staff memo that the language learning platform would gradually reduce its use of contractors who do “work that AI can handle.” He added that Duolingo would only raise its head count “if a team cannot automate more of their work.”

The memo was a source of backlash for von Ahn, who said in an interview with The New York Times published last month that he “did not give enough context” when he published the memo.

“We’ve never laid off any full-time employees. We don’t plan to,” von Ahn told the Times.

Last month, Paul Graham, the cofounder of startup incubator Y Combinator, made a similar observation on X.

“What AI (in its current form) is good at is not so much certain jobs, but a certain way of working. It’s good at scutwork,” Graham wrote on X on August 5.

Graham said that job seekers need to perform their tasks “so well that you’re operating way above the level of scutwork” if they do not want AI to take their roles.

“The most interesting consequence of this principle, though, is that it will become even more valuable to know what you’re interested in. It’s hard to do something really well if you’re not deeply interested in it,” Graham wrote in an X post.