LinkedIn Experiments with Recent AI Assistant for InMails

Microsoft-owned LinkedIn is experimenting with one more option to bring generative AI into the app, this time via an AI assistant in your LinkedIn inbox that’ll give you the chance to supply quick answers to questions as you engage in your DMs.

As you possibly can see on this screenshot, shared by app researcher Nima Owji, the brand new LinkedIn inbox assistant can be available via a dedicated icon within the UI, which would offer you with a generative AI assistant on your LinkedIn responses. That would make it easier to research key points, check spelling, get advice on conversational elements, etc.

The addition would expand on Microsoft’s growing generative AI empire, with the tech giant seeking to use its partnership with OpenAI to include ChatGPT-like tools into every surface that it may possibly, which has already seen it add AI generated profile summaries, job descriptions, post creation prompts, and more into the LinkedIn experience.

LinkedIn also added generative AI messages for job candidates inside its Recruiter platform last month.

It will also see LinkedIn finally follow up on its inbox assistant tool, which it actually first previewed back in 2016.

This barely blurry image was lifted from a LinkedIn presentation seven years back, where LinkedIn previewed its coming ‘InBot’ option. InBot, powered partially by Microsoft’s evolving AI tools (on the time) was presupposed to synch along with your calendar, which might then enable it to mechanically schedule meetings in your behalf, arrange phone calls, follow-ups, and more.

But it surely never got here to be. For whatever reason, LinkedIn abandoned the project shortly after this announcement – almost certainly because LinkedIn was seeking to latch onto the short-lived messaging bots trend, which Meta believed can be a revolution in customer support. Till it wasn’t.

Because messaging bots never caught on, LinkedIn likely decided to not hassle – though it’s interesting that, even back then, shortly after Microsoft’s acquisition of the app, LinkedIn was already talking up the potential of merging Microsoft-powered AI tools into LinkedIn’s functions.

It’s taken some time for that to return to fruition, but soon, we could have a greater version of InBot incoming, which might theoretically give you the chance to include these originally planned functions, together with more advanced generative AI responses and prompts.

That would actually be pretty useful on LinkedIn, with various functions that would enable you to maximize your lead nurturing efforts, including immediately accessible info on the user that you simply’re interacting with, to personalize the exchange.

In fact, there may be also a level of risk that the more AI tools LinkedIn adds, the less human the app will develop into, with users getting generative tools to give you more posts, messages, profile summaries, and every part else in between over time.

Eventually, that would see numerous LinkedIn interactions becoming bots talking to other bots, while the true humans behind each account remain distant. Which might see more engagement happening within the app – and would definitely make for some interesting IRL meet-up scenarios in consequence. But it surely does also look like LinkedIn could, perhaps, be overdoing it, depending on how all of those tools are integrated.

We’ll discover. There’s no timeline on a possible launch for the brand new AI chatbot tool as yet.