Seriously, LinkedIn needs to calm down with all the AI integrations.
Fresh from adding AI assistants that can write your profile, improve your job ads, and even create trending feed posts on your behalf, LinkedIn is now also testing a new, centralized AI tool, that seems to incorporate all of this and more.
The new application is called ‘LinkedIn Coach’, which is designed to guide users through the various profile-building and usage options in the app.
As you can see in this example, shared by app researcher Nima Owji, LinkedIn Coach will help you:
“Apply for jobs, learn new skills, and find more ways to connect with your network – all backed by the power of AI.”
It essentially looks like an AI helper bot for LinkedIn specifically, though you can seemingly also ask it helpful, cool questions like: ‘What’s the culture of Microsoft?’ To which it will no doubt give an objective and totally non-corporate response.
It’s kind of like an AI helper for LinkedIn’s other AI elements, which will continuously guide you through the process for each.
But that, in itself, could be problematic, because really, it’ll just lead to more LinkedIn users automating all of their various interactions, and for a platform that’s looking to connect actual real people with actual real opportunities, that seems like it’s probably not the best approach.
I mean, if you can get an AI tool to create LinkedIn posts on your behalf, you can feign knowledge and experience, which is not actually coming from your head, while you can also simulate job applications that are more likely to succeed, but are potentially less likely indicative of your true skills.
Maybe, if you can use AI tools in that job as well, no one will ever know, but in the majority of cases, I suspect that these tools will just make hiring managers increasingly wary, and see them increasingly gearing their interview process around testing of each person’s actual capacities, as opposed to what they post via LinkedIn.
Which is the big risk for the app. By following the lead of parent company Microsoft, and going all in on generative AI, LinkedIn risks harming its own core offering, by becoming more and more automated, essentially leading to hustle culture bots trying to impress other bots in the app. If the feed becomes all simulated content, and job applications all start to sound the same, people will put less and less trust in what they read there, and that, eventually, could erode the core of what LinkedIn is.
But generative AI is the trend of the day, and there are definitely ways that it can be helpful, when used in moderation, in an assistive capacity.
The hope, then, is that this is how it is actually used. But I’d hazard a bet that won’t be the case.
