LinkedIn's Dan Shapero on 2024: AI will make our day-to-day lives easier

• Dan Shapero has been at LinkedIn for 15 years and is now its chief operating officer.
• He says LinkedIn is noticing that job seekers are increasingly interested in using AI effectively.

As the chief operating officer, Dan Shapero has a lot of responsibilities at LinkedIn.

Shapero, who's been at LinkedIn for 15 years, oversees how the job-networking platform works with customers who use it to help them hire new workers, educate their staffers, and market and sell their products. He has to know the customer inside and out. And he coordinates the execution of long-term strategy and major projects.

"I make sure we can get the big things done," he told Business Insider.

LinkedIn, owned by Microsoft since 2016, has evolved from its roots as a place for people to create a profile, build a professional network, and maybe look for a job, Shapero said. He added that the company had worked to add content focused on topics professionals care about.

He said LinkedIn would lean into AI and the job search. "The thing that many people are thinking about right now, given where the labor market is, is help with finding a job," Shapero said.

He added that people were wondering how to use AI effectively in their job search: How should they reach out to a company? How should they describe themselves and prep for interviewing?

"We've really tried to take all the AI capability that we have at our disposal and help job seekers be more effective in their search," he said.

Shapero's insights are part of Business Insider's year-end leadership package "Looking Ahead 2024," digging into visions, strategies, and challenges across corporate America.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What are you most excited about for 2024?

I think it's felt like a very uncertain year in the economy. Interest rates have been rising, and I think that stability on its own is going to be an enormous tailwind to business and to people being more comfortable in their roles. People are feeling like they can start to see the light at the end of the tunnel of a very uncertain economic cycle.

I think that in 2024 we're going to start to see some of the fruits of all of the AI capabilities that have been brought forward. I think we're going to see things in our day-to-day lives that become easier. I think we're going to see new ideas that we never thought were possible before.

Obviously we need to embrace these capabilities responsibly and ethically and with equity in mind, but I think we're going to be able to do things that we never thought were possible. And we're going to start to see the separation between vision and what's really available right now today. I think we're going to be amazed by what new capabilities are going to be at our disposal. I think AI is going to be very exciting.

What's your biggest concern for 2024?

I have to start with just the nature of what's going on around the world with global conflicts. We have employees in Europe. We have employees in the Middle East, in Israel specifically. We have many members of our team that have relationships with people that are also being impacted directly — family members, friends — by these conflicts. That's something I'm definitely personally concerned about: the continuation of conflicts and, at worst, the growth of these conflicts.

More practically, from a business perspective, I think one of the least talked-about business risks that we're going to face in 2024 is rising attrition rates at companies. Right now attrition is at an all-time low. If history is any pattern, attrition always catches up. Because right now, when the market's uncertain, people are holding on to their chairs. They really want to feel stability in their professional lives. But at some point they'll become more comfortable.

I think as the economy gets better companies will be at risk of seeing more and more of their people and top performers look for new opportunities outside.

So I'm worried that companies aren't spending enough time thinking about, right now, how their employees are doing and how do they make sure they're doing the things that will help their employees want to continue on the journey with them as the economy gets better.

What was one thing you got right in 2023?

We were lucky enough to see some of the next-gen AI models by being part of Microsoft in the middle of 2022. And I think the big decision we made was to basically rewrite our road map and to say we're going to deploy AI across a wide range of capabilities on our products.

We're going to use it to help recruiters. We're going to use it to help salespeople. We're going to use it to help job seekers. We're going to use it to help people write their profiles, because people can be awkward about describing themselves professionally.

We just saw so many different applications for this that the best thing we did was to realize this was going to be a time of massive experimentation to see where AI made the biggest difference.

What was one thing you got wrong in 2023?

Like many other companies, during 2021 and 2022 we saw a tremendous amount of growth in our business. There were pockets where we overhired, and so we had a layoff earlier in the year to make sure that we were growing the business in a way that made sense given the economic environment. And that's hard on everyone, particularly the people impacted and all their friends and colleagues.

I also think that it's an environment where finding energy in your day-to-day work is harder. Many people describe it as much more challenging than it used to be. And so I think that as a leadership team, bringing our attention to helping create energy for our teams has been something that I wish we acknowledged earlier in the year. I think we're doing great things about it now — getting people together more often, being more conscious of things that are tedious for our teams, trying to infuse more energy into discussions.

This idea of energy being such an important thing for everyone to be at their best is something I wish I personally had seen more clearly earlier in the year.