LinkedIn adds AI-powered search to help users find people

Over the past two years, LinkedIn has sought to integrate AI into various parts of its platforms, including ad copy, content creation, personalized summaries, hiring assistance, job search advice and learning. The company is now finally adding AI to one of the most used parts of the site: search.

Earlier this year, the company released a job search tool for members in the US, allowing them to search for jobs using natural language searches. Now the company is expanding the feature to people search.

Users can use searches like “Find me healthcare industry investors with FDA experience,” people who are “co-founder of a productivity company and based in New York,” or “Who in my network can help me understand wireless networks.”

Until now, LinkedIn’s search has been more complicated. You can type a few words to find the right people or rely on many different LinkedIn filters hoping to get the right results. Additionally, you should also think about what kind of words you would like to use to get the best out of the search system.

“With lexical searches, you either have to know the person’s exact title, or you have to struggle with filters to find the right person. And if you didn’t know the right combination, the right person went undiscovered. The new AI-powered people search is designed to be the quickest route to the person who can help you the most,” Rohan Rajiv, senior director of product management at LinkedIn, told TechCrunch on a call.

The company said in its initial testing it has seen people use this to find others who can help them with their next job, grow their business or boost their career prospects.

Search has been an area where all internet platforms rushed to add AI. Seeing that people are drawn to chatbots like ChatGPT and Perplexity for answers, established search engines like Google, Bing, Brave, and DuckDuckGo have added AI-powered answers. There are plenty of startups going on AI-powered people search also. Reddit has also pushed heavily into AI-driven search and locked down its platform’s data, asking other companies to sign a licensing agreement for AI training and use.

LinkedIn is one of the most used sites in AI demos for AI agents, browsers and assistants. However, the Microsoft-owned company has not yet imposed any restrictions on its data.

“I think we’re still early in this era of browsers and how they work on behalf of people. I think over time we’ll have more robust policies [around browsers]” Rajiv said.

“More broadly, I’ve seen a lot of demos trying to reason through someone’s LinkedIn network. This is an area where I think it will be hard to find a replacement for the real thing, as this has been the worst search ever.”

LinkedIn is rolling out AI-powered people search to premium users in the US, with plans to expand to other regions in the coming months. People who access this feature will see “I’m looking for…” in the search bar instead of “Search.”

The search is not perfect. You’ll get different results if you use a query like “people who co-founded a YC startup” compared to using “Y Combinator” in the search. If you search for “people who co-founded a Voice AI startup,” there are also people who have a LinkedIn highest voting badge to appear.

The company said it is working on improving the way the search function understands the search query.