https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/29/linkedin-launches-its-first-ai-agent-to-take-on-the-role-of-job-recruiters/

LinnkedIn, the social platform used by professionals to connect with others in their field, hunt for jobs, and develop skills, is taking the wraps off its latest effort to build artificial intelligence tools for users. Hiring Assistant is a new product designed to take on a wide array of recruitment tasks, from ingesting scrappy notes and thoughts to turn into longer job descriptions, through to sourcing candidates and engaging with them. 

LinkedIn is describing Hiring Assistant as a milestone in its AI trajectory: it is, per the Microsoft-owned company, its first "AI agent"… And one that happens to be targeting one of LinkedIn's most lucrative categories of users (recruiters).

LinkedIn said the AI assistant is now live with a "select group" of customers (large enterprises such as AMD, Canva, Siemens and Zurich Insurance among them). It's slated to be rolling out more widely in the coming months.

The platform was always an early adopter of AI in its back end — (somewhat creepily) folding AI techniques into its algorithms to produce surprisingly accurate connection recommendations to users, for example. 

The viral rise of generative AI a couple of years ago, however, left LinkedIn — like pretty much every other tech company — scrambling to bring its front end up to speed.

LinkedIn didn't have to look too far to start to fix that. Microsoft has a deep financial and operational partnership with generative AI giant OpenAI, and LinkedIn has been leaning hard into that relationship to roll out a number of tools lately, including learning coaches, marketing campaign assistants, and candidate sorters; writing and job hunting helpers; and profile refreshers — all powered by APIs from OpenAI's GPT large language model.

Hiring Assistant is the latest, and in some ways a more pivotal chapter, in that story — and so it's an interesting one for a couple of reasons. 

First, it's notable for how much it takes the work out of human hands. The company has, in fact, launched AI tools for recruiters before. A year ago, it unveiled its first GenAI helpers for sorting candidates as part of "Recruiter 2024" (actually revealed, like a new car model, in 2023).

If that was testing the waters, LinkedIn's now asking recruiters to just jump in.