LinkedIn — the Microsoft-owned social platform for those networking for work or recruitment — is now 21 years old, an aeon in the world of technology. To stay current with what the working world is thinking about most these days, and to keep its nearly 1 billion users engaging on its platform, today the company is unveiling a string of new AI features spanning its job hunting, marketing and sales products. They include a big update to its Recruiter talent sourcing platform, with AI assistance built into it throughout; an AI-powered LinkedIn Learning coach; and a new AI-powered tool for marketing campaigns.

The social platform — which pulled in $15 billion in revenues last year, a spokesperson tells me — has been slowly putting in a number of AI-based features across its product portfolio. Among them, back in March it debuted AI-powered writing suggestions for those penning messages to other users on the platform. And recruiters have also been seeing a series of tests around AI-created job descriptions and other features this year. This latest raft of announcements is building on that.

For some context, LinkedIn is not entirely new to the AI rodeo. It has, in fact, been a heavy user of artificial intelligence over the years. But until recently most of that has been out of sight. Ever been surprised (or unnerved) at how the platform suggests connections to you that are strangely right up your street? That’s AI. All those insights that LinkedIn produces about what its user base is doing and how it’s evolving? That’s AI, too.

“In one way or another, AI powers everything at LinkedIn,” lead AI engineer Deepak Agarwal wrote back in 2018 (he’s moved on since then).

What’s changed now is the world: AI has become a mainstream preoccupation, led in no small part by the advances of OpenAI and the evolution of services like ChatGPT, which let everyday people have a direct experience of how to use a computer brain to do work faster that they might have tried previously to do themselves.

And what’s also changed is that LinkedIn — which has in the past built a lot of its own AI tooling for all those back-end operations — is now leaning out. The company, which was acquired by Microsoft some years ago, is tapping tech from OpenAI and Microsoft to power a number of its new features, it confirmed to me.

OpenAI, as you know, is 49% owned now by Microsoft, which made a big investment of $13 billion in the company earlier this year. That’s been a very strategic stake, which has seen Microsoft infuse a number of its own products with OpenAI tech. While VP of engineering Erran Berger tells me that the company will continue to evaluate what tech it uses, and whether it will build its own Large Language Models and other AI products, for now LinkedIn is going to tap its parent company and its parent’s prime investment.

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