Unleashing Innovation: How LinkedIn is building for its future

We all need a dose of fresh inspiration to ignite our creativity and think differently. But inspiration isn’t something that can be forced, it requires being present in the moment and open to all its forms - big and small. That’s why our global engineering community dedicated a week to creating the space for that inspiration during our inaugural LinkedIn Innovation Week. Across a jam packed week of panel discussions, fireside chats and social activities, we encouraged our engineers to dream big and with purpose. Then, we channeled that energy toward action through our second-largest hackathon in the last three years.

Our research shows that more than half of LinkedIn members hold jobs that stand to be disrupted or augmented by AI, and the skill sets required for our jobs will change by up to 65% by 2030. The future of work is changing and we believe the technology foundations and products we’ve built can empower people to be more productive and enable them to do the things they are most passionate about. 

Here are a few of the big questions our engineers were encouraged to think about and work through during Innovation Week:

1. How do we tackle something as big as this GAI moment? 

It’s no secret that the world is undergoing immense change with generative AI. And at LinkedIn, it's shaking up what we thought we knew about building our platform with AI, and it’s doing so rapidly - sending our teams into uncharted waters. 

In my recent fireside chat with former NFL quarterback Alex Smith, he shared some advice that has been sitting with me since. He called out the benefits of tackling problems as a team, and how it’s important to remember you are never alone in something. When you feel stuck or unclear about what to do next, lean on your teammates and mentors to help you pull through and find the perspective you need to take the next step forward. It’s important to remember that we’re all in it together. 

He also discussed his process for navigating through uncertainty at different points during his career, calling out how important it is to focus on the details and the things you can control, rather than the unknown or doubt. This advice seems particularly relevant during our current moment with generative AI. As engineers, we have to address the seemingly impossible challenges in smaller steps, so we can tackle them with conviction. 

2. How do we build a platform that powers the future of work?

Our engineers are here to solve big challenges connected to our mission and vision. In a panel about the future of work, we discussed the enormous opportunity and responsibility we have to help our customers and members transition to a new skills-first, AI-centric world of work. That’s not an easy shift, but we believe it is the kind of challenge our technology can play a critical role in solving, by helping members and customers navigate the changing world of work.

If we want to see a world that prioritizes skills as a key way to hire, retain, motivate and grow talented professionals, then we need engineers thinking about building our platform in ways that promote that change. That includes building experiences that help people articulate and demonstrate their skills and leveraging AI to match individuals to jobs based on those skills.

3. How do we harness the power of AI in every product experience we build on LinkedIn?  

As AI advances, it will continue to transform how we work, learn, and interact. We’re exploring different ways to use generative AI in our products and on our platform to provide more valuable experiences – from helping people quickly tap into the wealth of knowledge on our platform via Collaborative Articles to reimagining our hiring and learning solutions. And we’re thinking about the different surfaces where AI can unlock opportunities for everyone, prompting our engineers to imagine new features and integrations that support diverse needs – such as tools that help you digest content.

It was great to see that during our Innovation Week hackathon our engineers took the challenge of innovating to heart, and never lost sight of the value they wanted to generate for our members. Every idea presented had an AI-supported element to it. Whether it was a product feature or tool meant to improve the experiences of our engineers and employees, the hacks showed we are embracing an AI-first mindset and exploring where the technology can make tangible differences in professionals' lives. Some ideas even took ideas that seemed impossible during other points in our platform’s history and used the emerging capabilities of generative AI to make them practical and achievable. 

Catalyzing change by embracing it

The evolving world of work presents challenges, but our platform and technology are positioned to deliver the change we envision for this era of AI and evolving skill sets. Taking the energy from the week and the fantastic hacks our engineers have built, I’m optimistic that we’re ready to engineer an even greater future for the world of work together.