AI-Powered Conversational Search Now on LinkedIn

Key Highlights

• New Feature: LinkedIn has introduced AI-powered conversational search tools to enhance user experience.
• Functionality: Users can now input queries in natural language to find relevant members, pages, and posts.
• Professional Networking: This feature aims to streamline the process of connecting with professionals by simplifying search criteria.
• Availability: The updated search option is currently live for all LinkedIn Premium subscribers in the U.S. and will soon be available to all members.

Just when you thought that LinkedIn couldn’t possibly add AI to any other part of the app, it’s rolling out yet another AI element, this time within its search tools, with conversational queries to help you find relevant members, pages, and posts in the app.

Though people are the focus, and I’m not sure what results you’ll get on the other elements. As you can see in this example, now, LinkedIn’s search bar will be able to provide results based on basically any criteria that you enter into the prompt.

As explained by LinkedIn’s Chief Product Officer (for now at least) Tomer Cohen:

“Describe what you need in your own words, and we’ll surface the people who can help across your network. Type it like you’d say it, for example: ‘ex-coworkers who became founders in healthcare in NY,’ ‘angels with FDA experience for an early biotech,’ ‘Spanish-speaking school counselors in Austin focused on learning differences.’ From ‘who should I talk to?’ to ‘here’s who can help,’ it’s how you can unlock opportunity on LinkedIn.”

Wow. Those are some specific examples. Who the heck is searching for ‘ex-coworkers who became founders in healthcare in NY,’ or has enough coworkers who’ve become founders in healthcare that they can’t recall the specific one that they’re looking for?

Silicon Valley perspective skew aside, it could be a much easier way to find relevant matches on LinkedIn, by using plain language queries to find people, which could also help to give you very specific matches, without having to use LinkedIn’s filters.

Though I wonder how deep it goes. If I search for ‘that one guy in my network who embarrassed himself by posting about his daughter’s friends,’ I wonder whether it’ll be able to give me that match. What about ‘people in my network with criminal convictions’?

This was the problem with Facebook’s Graph Search back in the day, with people quickly working out that you could use it to find less-than-ideal information about people and entities within your network.

Of course, LinkedIn search can presumably only find matches based on the data posted in the app, and because everyone’s trying to put their best foot forward on the professional social network, there’s unlikely to be anything too embarrassing. But if it can also cross-match profile info with posts, there could be some unfortunate discoveries.

Maybe that’s not so bad, maybe it’s actually better to know this stuff about people in your network, so maybe this is a feature, not a bug, within this new system. But it’ll be interesting to see what results it produces, and whether users are happy with how they’re represented in these displays.

LinkedIn added similar conversational language queries for job seekers back in May, with its evolving AI tools now able to provide more insight, based on LinkedIn’s unmatched professional database.

And with parent company Microsoft continuing to invest billions into AI projects, you can bet that it’s keen to make AI the focus, which is why you can now use AI in virtually every aspect of your LinkedIn experience.

But don’t use it for posting comments, or coming up with posts, or really doing anything that misrepresents your actual skills or capacity. Because if your presence ever amounts to any real work or job offers, they’re gonna find out. Unless, of course, you use AI for that as well, but basically, I don’t agree with LinkedIn enabling misuse of AI in this respect, making it easier for members to present themselves as in-the-know by just generating posts with AI.

But in certain purposes, for certain uses, there are some valuable AI functions available in the app.

LinkedIn says that its updated AI search option is now live for all LinkedIn Premium subscribers in the U.S., and will be coming to all members soon.