Speaker 1: You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and
Speaker 1: Tim Stenebek on Bloomberg Radio.
Speaker 2: Hey, never too late to be talking about a new
Speaker 2: year's resolution.
Speaker 1: Yeah, maybe things like eating better, getting more sleep, working out,
Speaker 1: more munched on our popcorn. Yeah, the hate Popcorn's okay.
Speaker 1: Maybe the new year's resolution for you, Carol is learning
Speaker 1: another language.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I could kind of brush up on my Spanish.
Speaker 2: You have so much spare time, Yeah, exactly, I can multitask.
Speaker 3: Well.
Speaker 2: There are plenty of online platforms out there to help
Speaker 2: you do that. Among them, though, is Babel, the Berlin
Speaker 2: based company that does exactly that helps you learn a
Speaker 2: new language.
Speaker 1: Well, we've got back with us Julie Hansen, the US
Speaker 1: CEO of Babel. It's a role that she's had since
Speaker 1: twenty seventeen. We should note Julie also the former COO
Speaker 1: and president of Business Insider. It's a role that she
Speaker 1: served in when Axel Springer bought bi back in what
Speaker 1: twenty fifteen, value the company for four hundred and fifty million.
Speaker 1: Julie joins us on Zoom from New York. Julie, good
Speaker 1: to have you with us this afternoon. How are you.
Speaker 3: Good. Thanks for having me Sam and Carol.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, thanks so much for coming back here. So
Speaker 1: I kind of made this joke about having so much
Speaker 1: spare time there. But at the same time, the whole
Speaker 1: point of the app based companies that help you learn
Speaker 1: another language is that you kind of do them when
Speaker 1: you do have a few minutes. Talk to us a
Speaker 1: little bit about how you differentiate Babel in a marketplace
Speaker 1: that has Rosetta Stone, it has duo Lingo. There's, you know,
Speaker 1: so many options out there for people to learn another language.
Speaker 4: You're right there are, and it is a great New
Speaker 4: Year's resolution. So I love that Carol is on it
Speaker 4: and trying one thing. You know, we do say that
Speaker 4: with Babel you only need like ten to fifteen minutes
Speaker 4: a day, and that's actually really important because you'll do
Speaker 4: better learning consistently versus binge learning. I think it's probably
Speaker 4: like studying for a test in college. You want to
Speaker 4: keep going with a daily habit versus one giant study session.
Speaker 4: But Babel is very much about learning efficacy. You know,
Speaker 4: we are about getting you conversational. It's not comparable to
Speaker 4: college in that sense. We understand that our users want
Speaker 4: to learn a language to speak it and use it
Speaker 4: in their lives, not to not to pass a test necessarily.
Speaker 4: So that's the focus. We use a lot of human intelligence,
Speaker 4: augmented by some artificial intelligence. But the role of teachers
Speaker 4: in creating our product has been super important over the years,
Speaker 4: and we now have teachers actually giving live lessons in
Speaker 4: our Babbel Live product.
Speaker 3: So I think that's a quick way to think about Babbel.
Speaker 1: What about from the perspective of a business that needs
Speaker 1: its employees to brush up on a new language or
Speaker 1: learn learn a new language, Because there's a business side
Speaker 1: of this too, in terms of where the revenue comes from,
Speaker 1: at least here in the US. You'r us CEO, of course,
Speaker 1: what is what is personal use of it versus business
Speaker 1: and enterprise use?
Speaker 4: Absolutely the fastest growing portion in our business is the
Speaker 4: B to B business, the business use, and that's.
Speaker 3: Very interesting in the US.
Speaker 4: It's quite different from the use case we see in Europe.
Speaker 4: So in the US we really have one main use
Speaker 4: case or two languages together make up a main use case.
Speaker 4: So English speakers learning Spanish, Spanish speakers learning English.
Speaker 3: You know, we have many.
Speaker 4: Different industries that we serve, but we're clearly seeing a
Speaker 4: trend toward those industries that have a large proportion of
Speaker 4: Spanish speaking workers in them. So that can be anything
Speaker 4: from healthcare even to like manufacturing and construction, and it's
Speaker 4: interesting and baseball, by the way, we have something like
Speaker 4: eight MLB teams working with us, and it's bilateral. You know,
Speaker 4: we find workers learning English, managers learning Spanish. To generalize,
Speaker 4: there can be a mix of those two, of course,
Speaker 4: but that's the general trends and that definitely ties in
Speaker 4: with the trends we see in the US in consumer
Speaker 4: where Spanish is by far our biggest language.
Speaker 1: Are you seeing this added at all as a workplace perk?
Speaker 1: Like companies that are saying, you know, come work for
Speaker 1: us because we believe in continuing education and we'll pay
Speaker 1: for you, like for example here at Bloomberg. You know,
Speaker 1: now we have virtual physical therapy that's new this year.
Speaker 2: I think we could talk about that.
Speaker 1: I hope I don't get in trouble for Doug about
Speaker 1: I think it's a pretty cool. I think it's a
Speaker 1: pretty cool new thing. But would an HR department ever say,
Speaker 1: you know, we want to attract and retain talent. One
Speaker 1: way we can do that is by offering babble. Do
Speaker 1: any companies do that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, absolutely, maybe a little more so in Europe than here.
Speaker 4: But it's a good use case of both cases. For example,
Speaker 4: we work with a major ad agency that has a
Speaker 4: large international program where they move their people around and
Speaker 4: they bought a large license to prep people for those trips.
Speaker 4: So and that's but that's kind of a it's a
Speaker 4: it's a perk for them. So yes, that is a
Speaker 4: use case. But honestly, I'm a little more excited about
Speaker 4: the use case where I feel we can really make
Speaker 4: a difference, which is around safety. You know, in a
Speaker 4: lot of our B to B situations, we have workers
Speaker 4: in say meat packing or manufacturing or warehouses, and there
Speaker 4: are safety issues if they can't communicate with their teammates
Speaker 4: or their managers. So, you know, making the chance for
Speaker 4: bibble to improve the safety of people's jobs but also
Speaker 4: their career prospects, their earning potential, that's really exciting.
Speaker 2: Hey, do you ever worry?
Speaker 3: It's so funny.
Speaker 2: We had a conversation with our Rachel Metz, who covers
Speaker 2: all things AI and all the stuff that's going on.
Speaker 2: You are you worried them at all about chatbots kind
Speaker 2: of replacing some of what you do.
Speaker 4: And I'm like even amazed.
Speaker 2: On my phone, you know, I can type something in
Speaker 2: it translates it right away, and it just sends it
Speaker 2: off to whomever. So I do think about that that
Speaker 2: is potentially a threat.
Speaker 3: To what you do.
Speaker 2: So I'm curious does it keep you up at night
Speaker 2: or how are you thinking about that and how it
Speaker 2: applies to kind of what you do or maybe how
Speaker 2: you guys adapt to that.
Speaker 4: There's kind of fringy use cases where that can erode
Speaker 4: the need to learn a language if you're just using
Speaker 4: it for those sort of transactional interactions.
Speaker 3: Our learners, generally speaking, want to communicate. They want to
Speaker 3: learn a language.
Speaker 4: To speak to someone, to take that trip because their
Speaker 4: mother in law speaks a different language, whatever it is.
Speaker 4: And you know, people already five years ago people went
Speaker 4: traveling and held up the phone, you know.
Speaker 3: To use as a live translator.
Speaker 4: So that use case, I think is already well established
Speaker 4: and we don't worry that much about that. It's the
Speaker 4: it's you know, our purpose as a corporation is creating
Speaker 4: mutual understanding through language. So you know, mutual understanding is
Speaker 4: really much deeper than quick translation.
Speaker 1: Well, speaking of AI, Carol brought it up. Are you
Speaker 1: using and integrating AI tools at all and the way
Speaker 1: that you develop courses, the way that teachers develop courses
Speaker 1: and then deploy that for people to learn.
Speaker 3: We are, and which is very exciting.
Speaker 4: We've actually had a machine learning and AI and the
Speaker 4: product for a long time now.
Speaker 3: One of the key concepts that.
Speaker 4: You find in our product and in language learning in
Speaker 4: general is this notion of space repetition, where we bring
Speaker 4: things back to you and remind you of what you've
Speaker 4: already learned. And so there's quite a bit of machine
Speaker 4: learning in the product that does that. Just to use
Speaker 4: one example, and we see possibly we have we're in
Speaker 4: the works direct features where a consumer can interact directly
Speaker 4: with the AI and have a conversation and get training
Speaker 4: that way. So yeah, we think that AI is fantastic
Speaker 4: augmented by HI you know, the human intelligence. Those two
Speaker 4: go together really nicely.
Speaker 1: So how do you think that will change the way
Speaker 1: the business is run in terms of margins or in
Speaker 1: terms of you know, how you guys are able to
Speaker 1: run the business. Does it have like does it does
Speaker 1: it have an effect on the bottom line?
Speaker 4: I hope so, because otherwise, I mean, it's expensive to
Speaker 4: use AI. So if we only add costs and don't
Speaker 4: figure out how to be more efficient with it, we
Speaker 4: will have a problem. We actually have initiatives across the
Speaker 4: whole organization to use AI and to come up with
Speaker 4: use cases and experiments, et cetera.
Speaker 3: So everything from marketing, copywriting.
Speaker 4: To you know, deep feature development in the product we're
Speaker 4: embracing AI, but.
Speaker 3: We don't really have any I think we will.
Speaker 4: We expect there to be cost savings that come out
Speaker 4: of this, but we're starting really more with the efficiency,
Speaker 4: productivity and like you know, use user experience as the
Speaker 4: primary goals.
Speaker 2: All right, Julie, where we started? So I am curious
Speaker 2: New Year resolutions. Do you find a jump in people
Speaker 2: on your platform at the beginning of the year because
Speaker 2: they're like, yeah, I think I want to I want
Speaker 2: to lose some weight, and I want to learn a
Speaker 2: new language. Just give us an idea. We've about thirty
Speaker 2: forty seconds left.
Speaker 4: January is the biggest month of the year every year.
Speaker 4: It's super important and people tend to subscribe in January
Speaker 4: and then they really use it. So our job is
Speaker 4: to keep them going throughout the year. But absolutely, and
Speaker 4: you think about a January sets you up for your
Speaker 4: spring and summer travel.
Speaker 3: So it's very important.
Speaker 2: All right, So what's the weakest month.
Speaker 3: I'm curious now that we went down this path.
Speaker 2: Just got about fifteen seconds.
Speaker 4: The dead of summer, you know, especially in Europe where
Speaker 4: everyone's traveling, like they're getting the payoff for all that
Speaker 4: work they've done to learn the language.
Speaker 3: In the summertime, I want to drink the margarite.
Speaker 1: Rather than learn the language of Like I said, they
Speaker 1: go hand in hand. You've got to be on the
Speaker 1: ground in that country to actually learn the language as well.
Speaker 1: Like you know, that's a big part of the education.
Speaker 2: I totally agree, you immerse yourself in it. Yeah, but
Speaker 2: this is a good starting place. Julie, thank you so much.
Speaker 2: Happy New Year. Julie Hanson, us CEO of Babbel, jenningsand
Speaker 2: Zoom in New York.
Speaker 3: Great to check back with her.