Mohak Shroff, the senior vice president and head of engineering at LinkedIn, acknowledges that everyone wants a crisp definition explaining what an AI agent is and what workplace tasks they can perform. But he encourages a broad and expansive view of the emerging technology.
“An AI agent is going to be many things,” says Shroff, who leads engineering, operations, IT, and security at the Microsoft subsidiary. “Let’s get specific about the task.”
Tech giants like Salesforce and ServiceNow, alongside with a number of startups, have been racing to launch AI agents, which use foundational models to complete complex, multi-step task (though humans frequently check the work before the agentic systems complete any assignments).
For chief information officers, increasingly inundated with agentic AI pitches from vendors, the details and definitions of this technology are important. Already, skepticism has been building about overspending on too many off-the-shelf agentic systems, though surveys of technologists frequently show a majority intend to deploy at least a few AI agents this year.
LinkedIn’s agentic pitch to customers began last fall with Hiring Assistant, which allows recruiters to upload job descriptions, notes, and job postings into the tool, which can translate that information into desired role qualifications and flag qualified candidates. Over time, the intention is that Hiring Assistant will become uniquely personalized as the agentic system ingests each recruiter’s feedback and preferences.
Shroff says Hiring Assistant gives recruiters more time to talk to candidates and build a desirable talent pool for their companies or clients, and less time doing routine tasks like performing searches online and sending cold emails to lure talent, often at a low response rate.
LinkedIn says that 40 of the 55 initial batch of charter customers of Hiring Assistant were surveyed (or 73%) to report that the tool saved them at least one hour when sourcing for a role. LinkedIn InMail acceptance rate of candidates was 36% when Hiring Assistant was enabled versus 28% for manually sourced candidates. Early customers using the tool include German conglomerate Siemens, telecommunications giant Verizon, and software provider SAP.
In the future, Shroff envisions that agentic technology can help with job training and coaching. “These are all agents,” he says. “But the manifestation of them is slightly different in each case. One's an assistant, one's a coach, one's a tool.”
Shroff anticipates that for the foreseeable future, humans will remain in the loop and will oversee Hiring Assistant and other AI agent tools LinkedIn launches. He says the systems aren’t accurate enough to handle most complex tasks over any extended period of time. “In the event that the AI fails, which can happen, we believe far more in the infallibility of humans or the ability of humans to adapt,” Shroff says.
But he anticipates that the type of tasks knowledge workers are responsible for will change quite drastically. “Our role will start to morph from being the doers of the work to the supervisors of the work,” Shroff says. External studies tend to agree. An estimated 15% of day-to-day tasks may be handled by agentic AI by as soon as 2028, according to research firm Gartner.
Shroff likens this to his own career trajectory. He joined the professional networking platform in 2008 as a senior engineer but then began to serve as a manager by holding various director- and VP-level roles on his way to becoming an SVP in 2017. The chief technology officer, chief AI officer, chief information security officer, and VPs of developer productivity, productivity engineering, and product engineering all report to Shroff. That's due to LinkedIn's strategy that everything built for the company’s workforce is also intended to be offered externally to recruiters and job seekers.
“All those things fit into that single ecosystem and separating any of them would actually feel broken,” explains Shroff.
LinkedIn’s own internal workforce is also excited about the possibilities for agentic AI. The company recently hosted a week-long hackathon and many of the ideas floated were focused on agentic and generative AI. More than 10% of the company's workforce participated in some capacity. Shroff says his colleagues are also encouraged to take LinkedIn’s learning courses to get up to speed on what agentic means for them but also, advises they keep a very, very open mind.
“It’s just ridiculously early,” says Shroff. “The only answer, when that’s the case, is just keep playing.”
John Kell
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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