LinkedIn is launching its new AI-powered people search this week, after what seems like a very long wait for what should have been a natural offering for generative AI.It comes a full three years after the launch of ChatGPT and six months after LinkedIn launched its AI job search offering. For technical leaders, this timeline illustrates a key enterprise lesson: Deploying generative AI in real enterprise settings is challenging, especially at a scale of 1.3 billion users. It’s a slow, brutal process of pragmatic optimization.The following account is based on several exclusive interviews with the LinkedIn product and engineering team behind the launch.First, here’s how the product works: A user can now type a natural language query like, “Who is knowledgeable about curing cancer?” into LinkedIn’s search bar.LinkedIn’s old search, based on keywords, would have been stumped. It would have looked only for references to “cancer”. If a user wanted to get sophisticated, they would have had to run separate, rigid keyword searches for “cancer” and then “oncology” and manually try to piece the results together.The new AI-powered system, however, understands the intent of the search because the LLM under the hood grasps semantic meaning. It recognizes, for example, that “cancer” is conceptually related to “oncology” and even less directly, to “genomics research.” As a result, it surfaces a far more relevant list of people, including oncology leaders and researchers, even if their profiles don’t use the exact word “cancer.”The system also balances this relevance with usefulness. Instead of just showing the world’s top oncologist (who might be an unreachable third-d …
