LinkedIn’s AI Roadmap: Building Smarter Workflows for the Future Workforce

As the global workplace undergoes rapid transformation, enterprises are looking to AI to improve productivity, decision-making, and collaboration. LinkedIn, which has spent more than a decade building AI into its platform, is now accelerating efforts to deliver more personalised and actionable professional experiences for its members.

During an interaction with CiOL, Karthik Ramgopal, Tech Lead-Product Engineering & Distinguished Engineer at LinkedIn, highlighted how the platform’s innovation continues to revolve around member needs. Instead of developing AI features that follow hype cycles, LinkedIn is prioritising product decisions that solve real challenges for job seekers, recruiters, and businesses navigating talent shifts.

He emphasised India’s critical role in this journey, especially LinkedIn’s Bengaluru R&D centre, which contributes to major product and infrastructure advancements shaping the platform globally.

Interview Excerpts

LinkedIn often speaks of shaping the future of work, but many see it as still primarily a networking and recruiting platform. How do you respond to the view that its evolution is more incremental than disruptive?

Our evolution is based on the value we create for members and customers as well as the impact we have on their professional journeys. Our vision is to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce, which means solving real challenges with meaningful products.

We put members first and focus on the “job to be done”. We don’t build products just because they’re cool; they must solve real problems. This holds true even in the AI era, where every product decision is tied to member value.

LinkedIn has used AI for years in recommendations and search. What is genuinely new in this wave of AI, and how does it move beyond improving feeds and job suggestions?

AI is now at the heart of everything we do. The generative AI wave has unlocked new capabilities:

• AI agents streamline time-consuming tasks: e.g., our hiring assistant
• Transformer tech enables semantic search, supporting natural language queries
• Modernized recommendation systems powered by advanced sequencing models

We’re also investing in model compression to ensure costs and latency remain efficient at LinkedIn scale.

Agentic AI is becoming a buzzword. How does the Hiring Assistant actually change the hiring experience, and what early signals suggest it will make a real difference?

We built Hiring Assistant to solve real recruiter problems — not to chase hype. After a year-long charter programme, the results show:

• 62% fewer profiles viewed
• 69% higher InMail acceptance rate
• 48% less time spent on applications

This proves the product helps surface better candidates faster. The success is encouraging us to build more agents across LinkedIn workflows.

Our generative AI tech stack enables reuse of proven components, ensures human-in-the-loop control, deep observability, and supports open protocols like MCP for speed and scalability.

The Bengaluru R&D centre is critical to LinkedIn’s innovation. In a crowded Indian AI ecosystem, what makes the work done here distinctive and globally influential?

Bangalore is LinkedIn’s largest R&D centre outside Silicon Valley. Teams here build and scale products and platforms globally, including:

• LinkedIn Talent Solutions
• Marketing Solutions
• Trust & Safety
• LinkedIn Lite, Events, and Talent Insights

Key AI and data infrastructure are also built here, including systems powering feed ranking, semantic search vector DB, and AI for abusive content detection. India is a core innovation hub driving global impact.

With one of the world’s richest datasets of professionals, how does LinkedIn balance innovation with responsibility, ensuring privacy and avoiding bias as AI agents become more autonomous?

We follow Responsible AI by design. This means:

• Rigorous testing for hallucination and bias
• Human-in-the-loop workflows
• Sensitive actions require feedback and approvals
• Deep observability using tools like Langsmith and OpenTelemetry
• Extensive trust, privacy, and safety validation before launch

Hiring Assistant, for example, stayed in preview for a year to ensure risk coverage before global availability.

As AI creates and disrupts jobs, what skills are emerging as most relevant in India, and do you see a gap between what employers want and what professionals are preparing for?

India has an AI-savvy, innovation-driven workforce. Adoption is high: 62% of Indian businesses lead globally in generative AI adoption.

On LinkedIn:

• New skill additions are up 140% since 2022
• Professionals are 2x more likely to add AI skills vs. 2018
• AI is becoming a horizontal skill across functions

Key in-demand skills:

• Analytical thinking
• Creative problem-solving
• Effective communication
• AI literacy

However, readiness still varies across regions and demographics. Employers seek hybrid skill sets, combining technical depth with collaboration and stakeholder management. A skills-first approach can unlock 12x more talent in India and benefit women by ~29%.