You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Tim Stenebek on Bloomberg Radio.
Hey, never too late to be talking about a new year's resolution.
Yeah, maybe things like eating better, getting more sleep, working out, more munched on our popcorn. Yeah, the hate Popcorn's okay. Maybe the new year's resolution for you, Carol is learning another language.
Yeah, I could kind of brush up on my Spanish. You have so much spare time, Yeah, exactly, I can multitask.
Well.
There are plenty of online platforms out there to help you do that. Among them, though, is Babel, the Berlin based company that does exactly that helps you learn a new language.
Well, we've got back with us Julie Hansen, the US CEO of Babel. It's a role that she's had since twenty seventeen. We should note Julie also the former COO and president of Business Insider. It's a role that she served in when Axel Springer bought bi back in what twenty fifteen, value the company for four hundred and fifty million. Julie joins us on Zoom from New York. Julie, good to have you with us this afternoon. How are you.
Good. Thanks for having me Sam and Carol.
Yeah, well, thanks so much for coming back here. So I kind of made this joke about having so much spare time there. But at the same time, the whole point of the app based companies that help you learn another language is that you kind of do them when you do have a few minutes. Talk to us a little bit about how you differentiate Babel in a marketplace that has Rosetta Stone, it has duo Lingo. There's, you know, so many options out there for people to learn another language.
You're right there are, and it is a great New Year's resolution. So I love that Carol is on it and trying one thing. You know, we do say that with Babel you only need like ten to fifteen minutes a day, and that's actually really important because you'll do better learning consistently versus binge learning. I think it's probably like studying for a test in college. You want to keep going with a daily habit versus one giant study session. But Babel is very much about learning efficacy. You know,
we are about getting you conversational. It's not comparable to college in that sense. We understand that our users want to learn a language to speak it and use it in their lives, not to not to pass a test necessarily. So that's the focus. We use a lot of human intelligence, augmented by some artificial intelligence. But the role of teachers in creating our product has been super important over the years, and we now have teachers actually giving live lessons in our Babbel Live product.
So I think that's a quick way to think about Babbel.
What about from the perspective of a business that needs its employees to brush up on a new language or learn learn a new language, Because there's a business side of this too, in terms of where the revenue comes from, at least here in the US. You'r us CEO, of course, what is what is personal use of it versus business and enterprise use?
Absolutely the fastest growing portion in our business is the B to B business, the business use, and that's.
Very interesting in the US.
It's quite different from the use case we see in Europe. So in the US we really have one main use case or two languages together make up a main use case. So English speakers learning Spanish, Spanish speakers learning English.
You know, we have many.
Different industries that we serve, but we're clearly seeing a trend toward those industries that have a large proportion of Spanish speaking workers in them. So that can be anything from healthcare even to like manufacturing and construction, and it's interesting and baseball, by the way, we have something like eight MLB teams working with us, and it's bilateral. You know,
we find workers learning English, managers learning Spanish. To generalize, there can be a mix of those two, of course, but that's the general trends and that definitely ties in with the trends we see in the US in consumer where Spanish is by far our biggest language.
Are you seeing this added at all as a workplace perk? Like companies that are saying, you know, come work for us because we believe in continuing education and we'll pay for you, like for example here at Bloomberg. You know, now we have virtual physical therapy that's new this year.
I think we could talk about that.
I hope I don't get in trouble for Doug about I think it's a pretty cool. I think it's a pretty cool new thing. But would an HR department ever say, you know, we want to attract and retain talent. One way we can do that is by offering babble. Do any companies do that.
Yeah, absolutely, maybe a little more so in Europe than here. But it's a good use case of both cases. For example, we work with a major ad agency that has a large international program where they move their people around and they bought a large license to prep people for those trips. So and that's but that's kind of a it's a it's a perk for them. So yes, that is a use case. But honestly, I'm a little more excited about the use case where I feel we can really make
a difference, which is around safety. You know, in a lot of our B to B situations, we have workers in say meat packing or manufacturing or warehouses, and there are safety issues if they can't communicate with their teammates or their managers. So, you know, making the chance for bibble to improve the safety of people's jobs but also their career prospects, their earning potential, that's really exciting.
Hey, do you ever worry?
It's so funny.
We had a conversation with our Rachel Metz, who covers all things AI and all the stuff that's going on. You are you worried them at all about chatbots kind of replacing some of what you do.
And I'm like even amazed.
On my phone, you know, I can type something in it translates it right away, and it just sends it off to whomever. So I do think about that that is potentially a threat.
To what you do.
So I'm curious does it keep you up at night or how are you thinking about that and how it applies to kind of what you do or maybe how you guys adapt to that.
There's kind of fringy use cases where that can erode the need to learn a language if you're just using it for those sort of transactional interactions.
Our learners, generally speaking, want to communicate. They want to learn a language.
To speak to someone, to take that trip because their mother in law speaks a different language, whatever it is. And you know, people already five years ago people went traveling and held up the phone, you know.
To use as a live translator.
So that use case, I think is already well established and we don't worry that much about that. It's the it's you know, our purpose as a corporation is creating mutual understanding through language. So you know, mutual understanding is really much deeper than quick translation.
Well, speaking of AI, Carol brought it up. Are you using and integrating AI tools at all and the way that you develop courses, the way that teachers develop courses and then deploy that for people to learn.
We are, and which is very exciting.
We've actually had a machine learning and AI and the product for a long time now.
One of the key concepts that.
You find in our product and in language learning in general is this notion of space repetition, where we bring things back to you and remind you of what you've already learned. And so there's quite a bit of machine learning in the product that does that. Just to use one example, and we see possibly we have we're in the works direct features where a consumer can interact directly with the AI and have a conversation and get training that way. So yeah, we think that AI is fantastic
augmented by HI you know, the human intelligence. Those two go together really nicely.
So how do you think that will change the way the business is run in terms of margins or in terms of you know, how you guys are able to run the business. Does it have like does it does it have an effect on the bottom line?
I hope so, because otherwise, I mean, it's expensive to use AI. So if we only add costs and don't figure out how to be more efficient with it, we will have a problem. We actually have initiatives across the whole organization to use AI and to come up with use cases and experiments, et cetera.
So everything from marketing, copywriting.
To you know, deep feature development in the product we're embracing AI, but.
We don't really have any I think we will.
We expect there to be cost savings that come out of this, but we're starting really more with the efficiency, productivity and like you know, use user experience as the primary goals.
All right, Julie, where we started? So I am curious New Year resolutions. Do you find a jump in people on your platform at the beginning of the year because they're like, yeah, I think I want to I want to lose some weight, and I want to learn a new language. Just give us an idea. We've about thirty forty seconds left.
January is the biggest month of the year every year. It's super important and people tend to subscribe in January and then they really use it. So our job is to keep them going throughout the year. But absolutely, and you think about a January sets you up for your spring and summer travel.
So it's very important.
All right, So what's the weakest month.
I'm curious now that we went down this path.
Just got about fifteen seconds.
The dead of summer, you know, especially in Europe where everyone's traveling, like they're getting the payoff for all that work they've done to learn the language.
In the summertime, I want to drink the margarite.
Rather than learn the language of Like I said, they go hand in hand. You've got to be on the ground in that country to actually learn the language as well. Like you know, that's a big part of the education.
I totally agree, you immerse yourself in it. Yeah, but this is a good starting place. Julie, thank you so much. Happy New Year. Julie Hanson, us CEO of Babbel, jenningsand Zoom in New York.
Great to check back with her.