LinkedIn, the professional networking platform, has announced new artificial intelligence (AI) features for Premium subscribers. These tools are designed to simplify navigating the site by summarising content in the feed, including articles and job postings. This development raises some eyebrows but promises to save users time by highlighting relevant opportunities and insights at a glance.
Personalised Guidance
LinkedIn's AI assistant capability is positioned as a time-saving feature. It promises to analyse users' activity and interactions to surface relevant insights and next steps. For example, it may suggest skills to build, articles to read, or connections to reach out to based on a user's career context.
It will take on the hard work of parsing through long articles, videos, and posts and suggest ideas on how the information can be helpful to you.
Job-seeking with AI
Another AI feature is set to transform the job-seeking process on LinkedIn. Powered by OpenAI's GPT-4 language model, it aims to assist users in evaluating job fits and optimising their applications. This tool may streamline the job hunt for active seekers, but it also asks questions such as “Am I qualified for this role?” and “How can I best showcase my background?”
The significance of the 1 billion member milestone
LinkedIn has also announced reaching the landmark figure of 1 billion members. However, the celebration of this milestone is not without scrutiny. The platform has been criticised for focusing on total member counts rather than active user statistics, a more meaningful measure of engagement. LinkedIn's membership figures have been under the microscope, especially after its recent withdrawal from China and the subsequent questions about its growth momentum.
Despite these concerns, the platform's reported figures suggest that if the 1 billion member count holds true, LinkedIn could have around 400 million active users. This estimate is based on recent disclosures to the EU under new regulations, which revealed that about 40% of LinkedIn's European members are active.
In summary, LinkedIn's latest updates introduce AI tools aimed at efficiency but with potential pitfalls. The platform's growth to 1 billion members is noted, yet the significance of this number is debatable when active engagement is considered more valuable.
