LinkedIn Wants Its AI Bot to Help Find You a Job After You Lose Your Job to AI

If AI might be responsible for jobs being lost, then the tech could be used to get another one at least that’s what LinkedIn is trying to do. Users of the career-centric social network can access an AI-powered “job seeker coach” starting Wednesday to guide them to their next job. The Microsoft-owned LinkedIn hopes to move artificial intelligence to the forefront of users’ experience and aims to help job seekers prepare for their dream jobs.

The beta test is only available to premium subscribers who can launch the chatbot by selecting from a list of questions including “Am I a good fit for this job” and “How can I best position myself for this job?” In response, the job seeker coach advises the user if it is worth applying, providing additional information about how they might qualify for the role or points to gaps in their resume that could hurt their application.

“We had to build a lot of stuff on our end to work around that and to make this a snappy experience,” Erran Berger, LinkedIn’s vice president of product engineering, told CNBC Wednesday. “When you’re having these conversational experiences, sometimes it’s almost like search — you expect it to be instant. And so there’s real platform capabilities we had to develop to make that possible.”

LinkedIn’s AI-powered job seeker coach comes as the platform reached one billion members with more than 140 job applications submitted per second on LinkedIn, the company’s chief product officer, Tomer Cohen said in a press release. He confirmed that premium subscribers can use the chatbot without any additional cost, saying they will see a boost in their job applications and can use AI-powered messaging suggestions to appeal to hiring managers and recruiters.

AI-powered job tools have been criticized in the past for exhibiting bias against female applicants and minority groups. In 2018, Amazon scrapped its AI-powered recruitment engine after realizing the software singled out gender in resumes, thus discriminating against female applicants. Likewise, a 2019 analysis conducted by Harvard Business Review found AI recruitment tools were also biased against Black candidates for job board recommendations.

Microsoft invested $10 billion into OpenAI’s technology earlier this year in addition to its previous payment of more than $3 billion to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The company continues to compete with other Big Tech corporation’s investments in OpenAI like Google, Meta, and Apple.