Microsoft Owned LinkedIn Adds OpenAI-Powered Features
New features assist users in writing profiles and job descriptions
LinkedIn announced this week that it had added new generative AI features based on OpenAI’s large language models (LLM). Microsoft acquired LinkedIn in 2016, and it acquired a reported 49% of OpenAI earlier this year. It was inevitable the leading business social network, and the leading generative AI company would eventually collaborate.
Of course, LinkedIn was likely to follow the lead of many other enterprise applications in adding generative AI features even without the close ownership ties. The company was also thoughtful about the first features it introduced. LinkedIn is primarily about representing your work experience and secondarily about hiring. The new generative AI features focus on helping users write better LinkedIn professional profiles and job descriptions.
Better User Profiles and Job Descriptions
The post by Tomer Cohen, LinkedIn’s chief product officer, said:
Crafting a LinkedIn Profile that showcases your personality and professional journey can feel daunting…To help make the process easier and more effective, we're excited to introduce a new tool that provides personalized writing suggestions…Our tool identifies the most important skills and experiences to highlight in your About and Headline sections, and crafts suggestions to make your profile stand out.
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We know that writing a job description can be a time-consuming and painful task, particularly if you're struggling to attract the right candidates. That's why today we're testing a new AI-powered job description tool that will make it faster and easier to write job descriptions.
Here's how it works: when you're ready to post a job, simply provide some basic information, including the job title and company name. Our tool will then generate a suggested job description for you to review and edit, saving you time and effort while still giving you the flexibility to customize it to your needs.
More to Come
Cohen also said, “We're actively exploring numerous promising opportunities to create unique value and innovation. Today, we're beginning to introduce these new offerings and this is just the start of an exciting journey together.”
In addition to serving as the public CV for every white-collar professional and a key hiring channel, LinkedIn is also an advertising and content platform. Using GPT-4 to write better headlines and analyze the best performers is an obvious next step from an advertising perspective. LinkedIn’s advertising revenue is already a multi-billion dollar business. Generative AI could help advertisers become more successful, fueling more ad spend on the platform.
LinkedIn, however, may be considering the trade-offs about generative AI’s role in content creation. Summarization of posts, articles, and news is non-controversial. This could also be applied to aggregating a summary of key comments in popular posts or summaries of your social graph posts for a week. These features could help users become more efficient consumers of key LinkedIn-posted content.
By contrast, there could be some concern about user posts and articles becoming AI content factories and not representing the authentic voice of users.
If LinkedIn dwells on this concern, it will not last long. Users will do this anyway with a wide variety of AI writing assistants. LinkedIn will want them to do it on the platform as a value-added feature with reduced friction. The company will also benefit from more visibility into AI-generated content by users.
The new profile-writing features will appear first for premium users that pay an annual fee. This is likely to be standard practice for feature introduction. Paying users get access first. What will be particularly interesting is how liberal the company will be with free users accessing generative AI features that carry a cost for every query and output.
Will Bing Chat Come to LinkedIn?
The other generative AI feature I think is likely to arrive in LinkedIn is Bing Chat. It may be called Copilot for LinkedIn or something similar, but this could be a powerful channel to drive more usage of Bing. If LinkedIn could drive search queries from within LinkedIn, both for on-platform information and general web searches, it could materially add to Bing’s search volume and steal additional market share from Google.
Bing Chat already exists, but today requires you to employ Microsoft’s Edge browser. As a web app, LinkedIn may be able to make this immediately available across browsers. That would be useful for LinkedIn users and certainly for Microsoft.
