(Credit: Bryan van der Beek/Bloomberg/Getty Images)
Every social media platform is looking for ways to inject artificial intelligence features, and LinkedIn is no different. However, its CEO has now shared that one of its AI tools isn’t as popular as the brand initially expected, and he has a theory on why.
LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky tells Bloomberg that users aren't very interested in the platform's AI-powered writing assistant for posts. When writing something, LinkedIn users can "push a button" to get suggestions. "It’s not as popular as I thought it would be, quite frankly," he says.
His theory is that LinkedIn users don’t want to share content that is clearly AI-generated. He believes users are more open to sharing AI-generated posts on rival platforms that aren't as career-focused.
Roslanksy continued, “This is your professional reputation in general, which means that people are less likely to share anything on LinkedIn than they are somewhere else because the barrier is much higher. Oftentimes, when something comes across as being very AI-obvious on the platform, the rest of the community will call you out.”
Sharing AI-generated content on your TikTok or X profile is less likely to impact your reputation, and therefore your career. “People are watching the community, and if they are using AI tools, they’re going back and making sure that it feels like there’s a human, authentic touch on top of it," he says.
Still, prospective employers are now looking for AI skills within job ads, and potential employees are beginning to add those skills to their profiles to improve their chances of winning a role.
In the last year, job ads on the platform have seen a sixfold increase in the number of mentions of AI as a necessary skill for the role. Users of the platform are now including "AI" as a skill 20 times more than they were this time last year.
Roslanksy also confirmed in the interview that the brand's recent job cuts weren't specifically about AI innovations. Microsoft, LinkedIn's parent company, laid off over 6,000 workers in May, citing AI as one of the major factors. Some of LinkedIn's roles were cut during this wave of layoffs, but the CEO says none of the choices were made because of AI.
Microsoft is rumored to be planning thousands more job cuts in July, mostly impacting the company's sales team.