LinkedIn Leans Into the ‘Agentic Era’ of AI Connection

Yeah, it seems like LinkedIn is pretty dedicated to its generative artificial intelligence (AI) approach.

In my social media predictions post for 2025, I noted that LinkedIn may have gone too far with AI, by making it too easy for users to fake professional competencies and knowledge through increasingly available generative AI tools for post creation, job letters, comments, etc.

Given that LinkedIn is all about representing your skills and comprehension, it seems to me that pushing more AI options actually runs counter to its goal to showcase such from each user.

LinkedIn does not see it that way.

According to LinkedIn Senior Vice President of Engineering Mohak Shroff, LinkedIn is actually just getting started in the “agentic era” of digital connection.

As per Shroff:

“As we enter the agentic era, our guiding principle is to continue to create economic opportunity and put our members first through agents personalized to you – that work where you work, how you work, and enhance opportunity for you […] This means we are building agents that should be efficient task-doers supervised by you, picking up the tasks you don’t want to do so that you can focus on what you do best.”

Yes, LinkedIn views the next stage of digital connectivity as the “agentic era,” where our day-to-day interactions will be increasingly guided by AI agents that are customized to your requirements.

“Whether that’s helping a recruiter hire for the right role, a marketer be more successful or a learner building the right skill. We will put you, the professional, in the driver’s seat giving the agent directions for the tasks you need completed and providing oversight on actions so that it can learn your preferences and make interactions more personalized to how you work. This will give you more time and space to focus on what you love about your job, increasing your access to opportunity. We see this as giving our members and customers agency in the agentic era.”

Within this, Shroff is looking to add more AI into the LinkedIn experience, not less.

So while you can already generate LinkedIn posts, articles, job letters, InMails and more, LinkedIn really sees that as only the beginning.

Which begs the question: What will LinkedIn actually represent when all of the content is generated by AI?

It won’t demonstrate member skills and insights, or even competencies and knowledge. And with that being the case, will your capacity to utilize AI actually be representative of your professional skill in itself?

“In this new era of professional life, our members will interact with a variety of agents daily, similar to how we currently use multiple apps in our everyday life. While I use over 20 apps daily now; in the coming years, these will be agents, all vying for my attention.”

Shroff’s view is that we’ll attune these AI agents to do all of the grunt work for us, though what you classify as work that’s not worthy of your personal attention is important in this respect.

I maintain that LinkedIn should be easing back on AI, as it should be a showcase of your actual skills and experience, and not representative of how AI bots can game its algorithms. Users are already complaining that the comments on LinkedIn posts are becoming increasingly AI generated, and as LinkedIn makes this easier and easier to do, by adding AI prompts in every element, that’s inevitably going to be the case.

Is that valuable? Is that using AI to enhance the experience?

In a perfect world, of course, people would only be using AI to complement their personal input, but we all know that scammers and spammers are going to use these tools to fake their way to prominence, in all apps.

And on LinkedIn, that could lead to people wasting time. Recruiters will increasingly need to be smarter about how they vet candidates, or they’ll end up conducting interviews with people who are clearly not suited to the role. AI tools can only take you so far, and should work in complement to your professional skills and experience, not as a replacement.

This is my concern, that LinkedIn leaning even further into AI will render the app useless as a connective tool and as a means to learn more about people’s actual knowledge and skills.

But LinkedIn’s looking to the “agentic era.” And that sounds like you’re going to get a lot more generative AI slop clogging your LI feed.