Between now and early-mid 2024, LinkedIn will add three new AI-powered features to the platform to bring even more useful functionality to the site.
The new features, based on OpenAI‘s technology, will enhance the site’s marketing, recruiting, and learning capabilities and complement the AI tools already available on the platform.
Microsoft, the owner of LinkedIn, is clearly looking to leverage its partnership with OpenAI and get even more value from the billions of dollars they’ve invested in the company so far.
Enhanced LinkedIn Ad Campaigns
The first of these new AI tools will strike fear into the hearts of anyone currently involved in digital marketing: it’s called Accelerate, and it enhances an already-existing LinkedIn service called Campaign Manager, which can be used to launch ad campaigns on LinkedIn.
By “enhance”, we mean Accelerate can generate ad campaigns by itself, including all text and imagery. It even suggests the most appropriate audiences to target. In short, Accelerate automates the creation and targeting of ad campaigns. This means even inexperienced marketers will shortly be able to roll out LinkedIn campaigns, quite possibly with very little supervision required.
Of course, human intervention is still needed at this stage of AI’s development to get the full benefit of everything Accelerate offers, so marketers aren’t completely out of a job. Yet. Job concerns aside, this sounds like a cool addition to LinkedIn’s AI-powered capabilities. And who knows, maybe it’ll result in higher-quality ad campaigns instead of fewer marketers.
Enhanced Recruitment on LinkedIn
The second new AI tool being rolled out is called Recruiter 2024, and it’s meant to help recruiters do an even better job of finding suitable candidates by using natural language queries. Behind the scenes, Recruiter 2024’s AI will take simple instructions to do things like “find WordPress specialists” and narrow the list of potential candidates into a few more relevant to the searcher’s requirements.
That might lead to candidates being presented that don’t appear, on the surface, to meet the recruiter’s requirements but who are relevant to the role thanks to the AI’s insights into their background and capabilities that aren’t immediately clear to a human observer. Neat!
Enhanced Business Advice
The third tool is LinkedIn’s AI-powered “Coaching Experience”, a new chatbot that people can talk to and ask business-related questions of. It’s intended to act as a virtual business coach, able to answer questions like “How can I be a better leader?” and “Please share insights on effective strategies for managing and motivating remote teams”.
The chatbot also suggests relevant courses inside the LinkedIn Learning platform, connecting users with materials that could benefit them based on the questions asked.
The chatbot’s answers are reportedly tailored to the user, so it clearly uses some AI black magic in the background, analysing whatever information LinkedIn grants access to, to be as helpful as possible. Also neat but a little scary, too. But then, with any new technology that has great potential to disrupt the status quo, that’s to be expected.
Not available immediately
These new AI features will not be available to everyone immediately, as Microsoft is slowly rolling them out in phases, starting with select users in North America. Eventually, all LinkedIn users will be able to use these new tools, so keep an eye out if you’re a regular user of the platform.
If you’re a marketer reading this with a sense of dread, don’t panic – LinkedIn’s new Accelerate tool will likely end up being just another arrow in your Quiver of Awesome and won’t be replacing you anytime soon.
And even if someone’s current employer tries, they will shortly learn the error of their ways and come running back to you, tail between their legs, as there’s far more to marketing than just the tools used to grab eyeballs.
Image by Nick Youngson