AI Will Not Save You. Reinvention Will.

**Kapil Surlaker** (0:02)
A lot of the products today, like ads and all the recommendations of his areas, which didn't exist at the time, new modalities like video, which didn't really exist, and all these new member and customer experiences, which were simply not, in some cases, possible, or in some cases, the relevance maybe wasn't particularly good, right? And the amazing innovations with our AI teams, and all the innovation around model architectures and so on, has created this amazing member and customer value.

**Gopi Rangan** (0:41)
Thank you for listening to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur, a podcast for founders with ambitious ideas. Venture capital investors and other early believers tell you relatable, insightful and authentic stories to help you realize your vision.
Welcome to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur. I'm your host Gopi Rangan. Today, we have a special episode, a different kind of episode. We have Bhaskar Ghosh, BG. He is going to be a guest host. So he's going to be the host for the episode today. And we have a guest Kapil Surlaker. BG and Kapil go a long way. They worked on something fundamental to where technology is today, the fundamentals of architecture, databases, artificial intelligence and all of those topics. So instead of talking about venture capital and startups, which is our typical topic, we're going to nerd out on deep tech. And BG is going to lead that conversation. He's going to be the host. And I'm going to invite BG to take over the mic and introduce Kapil. BG, welcome to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur. Kapil, welcome to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur. I'm really excited to have this special episode with the two of you running it. BG, go ahead.

**Bhaskar Ghosh** (1:59)
Gopi, happy new year and thank you, my friend, for having me do this nerdy talk with a very dear old friend of mine. Honored to be your guest host and very honored and happy to have my old friend, respected colleague from my Oracle and LinkedIn days and a very respected technology leader from Silicon Valley and a great executive, Mr. Kapil Surlaker. Kapil, thank you so much for joining us.

**Kapil Surlaker** (2:25)
Hey, BG, thanks for having me. Really excited to be on this podcast, big fan, and it's awesome to be here as a guest this time, especially with you as the guest host.

**Bhaskar Ghosh** (2:36)
Thanks, Kapil. Yeah, amazing. It's been so much fun even chatting about this podcast with you and our journeys. I mean, we started our careers at Oracle a couple of decades earlier. We wrote code together, we were lucky, and we'll talk about the Oracle side a little bit. And then we had an amazing adventure together at LinkedIn, where you and I helped start the infrastructure team in a way. And we're going to recap that journey. But I think we'll, given that you have done deep work, both on the AI side and the data side, applications, infra, and because now the enterprise is becoming AI first, yet another time, but in a much deeper way, it would be cool to like look at the future of the enterprise and future of leadership through your lens, through your remarkable journey at LinkedIn. Sounds good?

**Kapil Surlaker** (3:25)
Yeah, these are all fantastic topics, so looking forward to it.

**Bhaskar Ghosh** (3:29)
Amazing. Let's dive in and let's start with AI. Just to allay your fears, Kapil, I will not ask you about context graphs and decision trees and decision traces, even though they are important. But let's talk about the AI cycles and the upcoming AI revolution in the enterprise. But I was lucky to be at Yahoo doing AI in the ads area for four years. And then we both got to LinkedIn around the same time. We were so lucky to have you there, Kapil. Very briefly, why has AI been so critical at a business and an engineering team and product team like LinkedIn?

**Kapil Surlaker** (4:07)
Yeah, and you're absolutely right. This AI cycle itself is phenomenal. This is probably the greatest technological shift they're witnessing in probably the history of tech. But it's also building on the long history that we've had AI in the enterprise. And even before this latest generative AI explosion, at LinkedIn, machine learning was integral for many, many years, right? So I would say AI has been in LinkedIn's DNA for over a decade. And personalization, as you probably remember, has always been a key driver for many of the use cases at LinkedIn. So you might be a member or you might be an enterprise customer. Literally every part of the experience, whether it's people you may know, PYMK, your feed, your job recommendations, right? Or even like core things like, you know, content understanding and anti-abuse trust. A lot of it is driven by AI.