Tech Titans: Agents Built Around People with Mohak Shroff, former SVP of Engineering at LinkedIn

Mohak Shroff (0:00)

But there's something novel about what we're seeing now, where it's not just like data extraction. Like, I think we see that, we think of that as like tedious. We think of that as like, it's like, it's a utility. This feels like it's so much more than a utility now, right? Like it feels like it has responsiveness, it has like reaction to the things we want.

It feels far more personalized. And I think that's actually probably like the thing that's most magical about it, is that like a level of personalization. It feels like, and again, like at the end of the day, it's just a bunch of code. It's clearly not like thinking, but it feels like it understands me.

Joel (0:42)

So one of the things that caught my attention was, Alistair saying you guys are building, LinkedIn's building AI agents. You got to tell me about that. What's going on there?

Mohak Shroff (0:51)

Yeah, absolutely. So it's interesting. Like LinkedIn has a little bit of a history lesson. So like I've been here now, what is it?

It's coming up on 17, 16 and a half years. It's a long time. And like LinkedIn, it's this thing which, like I didn't appreciate this about LinkedIn from the outside. And honestly, sometimes even from the inside, you have to sort of step back and take a moment to really appreciate it. But like LinkedIn at its core has always been essentially like an AI application. Right? Like what do we do? Where this like, you know, connecting people to opportunity at massive scale. Like the moment you add connecting and scale, AI sort of like peeks into the picture. It's part of this core part of the picture. The way you connect people to things at scale is through AI.

And so like, what do we do? We connect people, like when someone shows up on LinkedIn and they want to learn about what's going on in the world, we connect them to other people, to knowledge, to jobs, to learning, to skills, to companies, etc. Like all of that forever has been essentially AI powering what LinkedIn does. And so, as over the last two years, the world changed radically with this emergence of this new technology, with Gen.AI and incredibly powerful models, these large language models. It sort of led to this moment of us asking the question of what does this mean both for LinkedIn as well as really what we do on a daily basis in terms of how we manifest the value we deliver in the world of work. I think one thing became really clear, like yes, we can continue to deliver, connect people to opportunity at a massive scale. We can use this technology to do so better every single day. We can make our UX more human, more easily accessible. We can make it more intelligent, more interactive. For sure, we can do all of that. But something else became really apparent, that there's a moment coming where these large language models are going to lead to the ability for a lot of what people do from a work perspective to start to actually be automated, to be done by agents.

And it led to us asking the question of like, as LinkedIn continues to want to be or continues to be the thing professionals look to, to make them more productive and successful every single day, how do we do that in the world of agents? So all these companies, everybody out there, a lot of people are thinking about agents as essentially replacing people in the world of work. It's like, what things can these agents do that will be like cheaper or faster or better, whatever it is?

And I'm sitting here at LinkedIn going, hold on, we have as a core value, and have for the better part of a decade and a half, had as a core value at this company, the idea that we are members first. We put the needs of our members, the ability to make our members more productive and successful at the forefront of everything we do. And so it's like, how do we take this agentic technology, these large language models applied to autonomous agents, to things that have the ability to make decisions on my behalf, to do work on my behalf, and how do we make them more human-centric? How do we ensure that as that agentic shift is occurring, it's occurring in a way that puts professionals at the center of opportunity rather than displaces them? What if we could build agents that actually take all the stuff I don't want to do and do that in the way that I want them to do it, but let me continue to do the things I really want to do? It's almost like an injection of increasing my agency, enabling me to do more of what I love, while the agents go and do the things I don't necessarily want to be doing, so I can do the things I got into the job for. So a really good example of this, we just recently launched a recruiting agent. And so when you look at our recruiting agent, we call it the LinkedIn Hiring Assistant. And so when you look at the assistant, Hiring Assistant, it's actually really interesting. What we did was we went and spoke to recruiters. Obviously, we recruit a bunch ourselves, and we reached out to a bunch of our customers, recruiters, and asked them, when you go and talk to a recruiter about what they do, there's this large list of things. There's a lot of time that they spend searching for candidates on LinkedIn, a bunch of time they spend filtering those candidates, working collaboratively with the engineering leaders or the leaders who they're hiring for to figure out whether or not these are the right candidates. Then they reach out to those candidates to get them interested, and then some number of those people will respond to them and say, I'm interested, and then they engage with those individuals now, where they're like, all right, ready. Now that you've responded, now I can engage and actually do the thing I became a recruiter to do, which is interact with people, talk to candidates, get you really excited about the job, help explain and shepherd you through the process, and ensure that ultimately I'm helping to build a remarkably high quality team at the company.