by tyler | Nov 1, 2023 | Tech
It was only a couple of weeks ago that LinkedIn was having a moment as a social platform, with business types gravitating to it as a stable and safer alternative to the unpredictability of the newly-named “X”. But don’t get too comfortable if actual human content is what you are expecting there:
Today the company — which says it will pass the 1 billion user mark this month — is taking the wraps off its latest efforts in the area of artificial intelligence: AI that will provide personalised digests for people reading content on the site, and AI that will help them write their own content on the platform.
Initially, the new tools will be rolled out to Premium (paying) users and they will appear in three areas.
You can use them to spruce up your feed; you can use AI tools to digest any linked articles, where you can use them write something smart on that article as you share it; and you can apply them to your job-hunting experience, typically when you send a response to a recruiter or if you’re a recruiter reaching out to a candidate.
Longer term, the plan will be to evaluate how these AI tools get used to weigh up how to expand them more.
“If it’s broadly applicable, [extending to all users] will be on the table,” Gyanda Sachdeva, VP of product management at LinkedIn, in an interview. “Premium users are very motivated [users of LinkedIn], so we expect it to be immediately valuable.”
She also confirmed that other media, such as video, was definitely on the roadmap for getting the generative AI treatment.
As with the raft of AI tools that Microsoft-owned LinkedIn announced last month , these new features will be powered by OpenAI, the AI behemoth that is now 49% owned by Microsoft after the tech giant invested tens of billions of dollars in the startup.
(Sidenote: It’s notable that amidst all of LinkedIn’s AI announcements, it’s also been laying people off , including in areas like R&D and engineering. The company is indeed streamlining, and as it takes its next steps in its evolution, it is doing so less as an independent entity.)
LinkedIn specifically is using OpenAI APIs from Azure, taping OpenAI’s Large Language Models and GPT-4, combining this with LinkedIn’s proprietary data to come up with generative AI outputs that are personalized to the individual.
LinkedIn declined to describe what part of the experience is unique to LinkedIn’s work, and what would be credited to OpenAI, but the result is essentially like a version of ChatGPT that’s meant to be personalized to you. When two different people see the same article on LinkedIn, if they each choose to use the AI tool to summarise that article or craft a comment about it, the AI will look at the individual’s professional profile, as well as their other activities on the site, to present a summary relevant to that person.
For users who don’t want to know what they already know, LinkedIn gives users options to ask questions related to the text to get other kinds of summaries.
LinkedIn has multiple reasons for building out these AI tools as it has.
First and foremost, it’s helping the site overcome some of the challenges of social media engagement, something that might be especially an issue on LinkedIn: given that connections on there are more likely to be from your professional network, people are not known for letting their hair down, and have to put their best, professional selves forward. Sometimes it’s easier not to post anything at all.
To that end, the tools are designed to get people to click more and create more, spending more time on the site overall.
Second of all, it’s keeping LinkedIn in the middle of the conversation. Today, regardless of whether using AI is just a novelty or the new normal, everyone is looking for it. LinkedIn, wanting to remain a relevant presence as it pushes into its third decade of life, needs to have an AI component.
Generative AI has proven to be catnip for engagement, but that can open the door to other usage, too. Come for the novelty of the new genAI tool, maybe stay for the interesting insights and networking opportunities.
The third area that these tools addresses is that of LinkedIn’s Premium business. LinkedIn made $15 billion in revenues last year and while it doesn’t say what proportion of that comes from paid subscriptions, it’s still a fast-growing part of the business, up 55% year over year as of last month. Now it’s sweetening the deal to see if it can keep up the momentum.
A look at how the AI tools work in practice:
by tyler | Oct 17, 2023 | Tech
Earlier this month, LinkedIn announced that it would roll out a raft of new AI-powered tools across the business. Today, it’s making a different kind of announcement focused on the future: The company is laying off 668 employees.
We understand from a reliable source that the majority of the layoffs, some 563, will be in R&D, with teams across engineering, product, talent and finance impacted.
The cuts, announced this morning, come five months after LinkedIn announced 716 job cuts , at the same time that it would be phasing out its app in China. Today’s cuts bring the total number of layoffs to Microsoft-owned LinkedIn to 1,384. In total, there have been more than 242,000 people laid off in the technology sector in 2023, according to employment tracker Layoffs.fyi .
“While we are adapting our organizational structures and streamlining our decision making, we are continuing to invest in strategic priorities for our future and to ensure we continue to deliver value for our members and customers,” the company said in an unsigned statement today. “We are committed to providing our full support to all impacted employees during this transition and ensuring that they are treated with care and respect.”
It didn’t specify which strategic priorities but a refocus on hiring more AI talent is likely part of the mix.
After getting acquired by Microsoft for more than $26 billion in 2016, LinkedIn became significantly less transparent in terms of its finances and other operational metrics. In Microsoft’s July 2023 full-fiscal-year earnings report, the company noted that it had more than 950 million members and over $15 billion in revenues, with Talent Solutions the single biggest contributor at $7 billion+.
“W e continue to use AI to help our members and customers connect to opportunities and tap into the experiences of experts on the platform. Our AI-powered collaborative articles are now the fastest-growing traffic driver to LinkedIn,” it said at the time.
More to come.
by tyler | Oct 17, 2023 | CNN, Tech
LinkedIn is laying off 668 people across its engineering, product, talent and finance teams as part of a broader restructuring, the social media platform announced Monday.
In a blog post, the social media site for professionals said it is making changes to its organizational structure and streamlining its decision making.
“Talent changes are a difficult, but necessary and regular part of managing our business,” the company said. Microsoft bought LinkedIn in 2016.
The company is dedicating many of its resources toward artificial intelligence. Recently, LinkedIn announced an AI-assisted candidate discovery for recruiters using the site. And in Microsoft’s most recent earnings report, LinkedIn reported its AI-powered collaborative articles are the fastest-growing traffic driver on the site.
LinkedIn already cut 716 positions in May and shut down its jobs app in mainland China. That decision was made amid shifts in customer behavior and slower revenue growth, CEO Ryan Roslansky said in a letter to employees.
In the wake of mass layoffs across the tech sector at the end of last year, LinkedIn enjoyed an uptick in users and “record engagement” among its 875 million members at the time, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told analysts in last October’s earnings call.
The company continues to grow financially. LinkedIn also announced in its most recent earnings report that it surpassed $15 billion in revenue for the first time during this fiscal year, and that its membership growth “accelerated” for the eighth quarter in a row.
by tyler | Oct 3, 2023 | Pulse, Tech
LinkedIn — the Microsoft-owned social platform for those networking for work or recruitment — is now 21 years old, an aeon in the world of technology. To stay current with what the working world is thinking about most these days, and to keep its nearly 1 billion users engaging on its platform, today the company is unveiling a string of new AI features spanning its job hunting, marketing and sales products. They include a big update to its Recruiter talent sourcing platform, with AI assistance built into it throughout; an AI-powered LinkedIn Learning coach; and a new AI-powered tool for marketing campaigns.
The social platform — which pulled in $15 billion in revenues last year, it tells me — has been slowly putting in a number of AI-based features across its product portfolio. Among them, back in March it debuted AI-powered writing suggestions for those penning messages to other users on the platform. And recruiters have also been seeing a series of tests around AI-created job descriptions and other features this year. This latest raft of announcements is building on that.
For some context, LinkedIn is not entirely new to the AI rodeo. It has, in fact, been a heavy user of artificial intelligence over the years. But until recently most of that has been out of sight. Ever been surprised (or unnerved) at how the platform suggests connections to you that are strangely right up your street? That’s AI. All those insights that LinkedIn produces about what its user base is doing and how it’s evolving? That’s AI, too.
“In one way or another, AI powers everything at LinkedIn,” senior engineer Deepak Agarwal wrote back in 2018 . (He’s still at the company .)
What’s changed now is the world: AI has become a mainstream preoccupation, led in no small part by the advances of OpenAI and the evolution of services like ChatGPT, which let everyday people have a direct experience of how to use a computer brain to do work faster that they might have tried previously to do themselves.
And what’s also changed is that LinkedIn — which has in the past built a lot of its own AI tooling for all those back-end operations — is now leaning out. The company, which was acquired by Microsoft some years ago, is tapping tech from OpenAI and Microsoft to power a number of its new features, it confirmed to me.
OpenAI, as you know, is 49% owned now by Microsoft, which made a big investment of $13 billion in the company earlier this year. That’s been a very strategic stake, which has seen Microsoft infuse a number of its own products with OpenAI tech. While VP of engineering Erran Berger tells me that the company will continue to evaluate what tech it uses, and whether it will build its own Large Language Models and other AI products, for now LinkedIn is going to tap its parent company and its parent’s prime investment.
Here is a quick rundown of all that is new:
Recruiter 2024 is a new AI-assisted recruiting experience, LinkedIn says. It will use generative AI to help recruitment professionals come up with better search strings to surface stronger candidate lists. Specifically, as you have seen in searches like ChatGPT, recruiters will now be able to use more conversational language to hone in on who they hope to find. It will also mean that search results will also have more suggestions outside of what recruiters might think they are looking for.
LinkedIn Learning will be incorporating AI in the form of a “learning coach” that is essentially built as a chatbot. Initially the advice that it will give will be trained on suggestions and tips, and it will be firmly in the camp of soft skills. One example: “How can I delegate tasks and responsibility effectively?” The coach might suggest actual courses, but more importantly, it will actually also provide information, and advice, to users. LinkedIn itself has a giant catalogue of learning videos, covering both those soft skills but also actual technical skills and other knowledge needed for specific jobs. It will be interesting to see if LinkedIn extends the coach to covering that material, too.
Marketing will also be getting an AI boost, specifically with a new product called Accelerate. While marketing and marketers have increasingly taken on technical expertise, this is an interesting shift. The idea, again, will be to let people run campaigns on LinkedIn more easily bypassing that heavy lift. One drawback is that Accelerate is limited to campaigns and data from within the LinkedIn walled garden. Given that marketing campaigns typically extend across multiple platforms and audiences, users might find the impact of the new tool limited.
Lastly, Inside Sales and selling to B2B audiences is also getting the AI treatment. This is a somewhat emerging area on LinkedIn, where sales people who are focused on B2B selling leverage LinkedIn to find new customers or to connect more tightly with those that are already in their networks. The new AI feature will be a search function to help find those potential connections then more easily and enter conversations with those leads. Given that AI sales of this kind are well established in the world at large — I’ve even heard VCs complain that they can’t consider “yet another AI sales startup” — this seems somewhat overdue for LinkedIn to add.
by tyler | Jun 8, 2023 | Tech
Weeks after Meta launched a suite of generative AI-based tools to help advertisers create different campaigns, LinkedIn has introduced its own tool to suggest different copies of an ad.
The company said that it uses data from a marketer’s LinkedIn page and Campaign Manager setting including objective, targeting criteria, and audience to suggest different introductory text to the ad. LinkedIn — a Microsoft subsidiary — is unsurprisingly using OpenAI models to create different suggestions of copies.
The copywriting suggestion works in a simple way. Marketers can input their copy into the “introductory text” box within the Campaign Manager. To get different suggestions for that text, they will have to turn on the “Generate copy suggestions” toggle.
The feature is currently in a test phase and available to some customers in North America. The company plans to add new functionalities, roll out the feature to new geographies, and add support for more languages in the coming months.
Image Credits: LinkedIn
Image Credits: LinkedIn
“We know you’re stretched to do more with fewer resources while driving ROI for your company. AI Copy Suggestions can help jumpstart your creativity and reduce the time you spend on your day-to-day tasks so that you can continue to focus on what matters — continuing to produce memorable campaigns and building your brand,” Abhishek Shrivastava, VP of Product at LinkedIn said in a blog post.
The company has been leveraging generative AI in multiple ways. In March, it introduced a “conversation starter” tool that used AI to write an intro to a post. In the same month, the Microsoft-owned company also introduced generative AI tools for writing profile bios and recruitment posts .
It’s important to understand that when people use these tools, LinkedIn doesn’t indicate if some or all text is generated by AI.
Using generative AI for ads is becoming a regular feature in big tech marketing solutions. In May, Meta launched its suite of projects that helps marketers with copywriting, background generation, and image cropping . Weeks later, Google introduced a new Product Studio, which lets advertisers create images using generative AI . The company is also using AI to transform ads and adapt them in search results .
