Being a Microsoft-owned company, this comes as little surprise.
Today, LinkedIn has announced that it will begin using AI to expand on its content, beginning with a new initiative called Collaborative Articles, which will use AI-generated prompts to then call on specific users for their expertise and input.
As explained by LinkedIn:
“These articles begin as AI-powered conversation starters, developed with our editorial team. Then, using LinkedIn’s Skills Graph, we match each article with relevant member experts who can contribute their lessons, anecdotes, and advice based on their professional experience. And, that’s when the real magic happens: when professionals share real-life, specific advice by contributing their perspectives to the work questions we’re all facing every day. Because starting a conversation is harder than joining one, these collaborative articles make it easier for professionals to come together and add and improve ideas – which is how shared knowledge is created.”
As you can see in the above example, Collaborative Articles will be highlighted in the LinkedIn feed, including a note on how many LinkedIn members have contributed. You’ll then be able to see contributor elements highlighted within the article, while there’ll also be a button for you to add your own perspective to the AI-created piece.
LinkedIn’s hoping that this will enable more members to gain more exposure for their expertise and experience in the app, which will also help them add more followers and connections.
To further facilitate this, LinkedIn’s also adding a new Community Top Voice badge in key skill areas related to Collaborative Articles, which will provide extra incentive for professionals to contribute their advice and experience. These new badges will be valid for 60 days at a time, with members required to keep contributing to Collaborative Articles to keep that recognition.
That’s a pretty good incentive, and you can imagine that it will keep members adding their opinions and insights to as many Collaborative posts as they can. And with AI tools generating the initial prompts, and building out the articles, it’s a fairly low-maintenance way for LinkedIn to boost engagement, which is already reaching new highs every quarter.
Microsoft, LinkedIn’s parent company, is already going all-in on generative AI, with its advances to its Bing search engine attracting big interest, and further integrations of ChatGPT also sparking new usage options in its other tools.
It makes sense that LinkedIn too will be getting into the same, and as such, this may just be the first of many new AI integrations coming to the app in the near future.
And while it may seem like a fairly light integration – and LinkedIn has been using similar prompts on human-created articles to get users to contribute for some time – it’s an interesting initial experiment, which could help LinkedIn to showcase user expertise, and boost engagement in the app.
Seems like a smart move – LinkedIn’s first Collaborative Articles are now live in the app.
