LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky joins Brad Smith to discuss his new book, Open to Work, about how AI is reshaping work, which skills matter most, and how to turn career uncertainty into practical opportunity.
A lot of people are asking the same question right now: Will I be left behind?
In this episode, Brad Smith sits down with Ryan Roslansky, CEO of LinkedIn and Executive Vice President at Microsoft, for a practical conversation about AI, the future of work, and what people can do now to stay ahead. Drawing on ideas from his new book, "Open to Work: How to Get Ahead in the Age of AI," Ryan shares a framework for thinking about careers in the era of AI that starts not with job titles, but with tasks.
Together, Brad and Ryan explore how work can be divided into three categories: tasks AI will automate, tasks AI can augment, and tasks that remain deeply human. They discuss why the most valuable skills may be the ones hardest to automate, including curiosity, courage, communication, and compassion. They also talk about how AI can become a genuine thought partner at work, helping people save time, sharpen ideas, and focus more energy on judgment, relationships, and creativity. Ryan explains why careers are no longer ladders but climbing walls, why cross-disciplinary roles are emerging, and why adapting to AI is as much a mindset shift as a technical one.
This is a conversation for anyone early in their career, mid-career, or helping the next generation navigate a changing workplace. It’s about turning anxiety into action and using AI to build a more meaningful future of work.
RYAN ROSLANSKY: It’s an uncertain time right now in the world of work. There’s a lot of anxiety. It feels like the old playbooks aren’t relevant anymore. Maybe the new playbooks haven’t even been written yet. And sometimes when you’re mired in the technology, and especially with AI, and you kind of draw out where this could potentially go, it leads you to some dark places, and some uncertain places. And Aneesh and I wanted to take this moment to write the book, not as a crystal ball of what’s going to happen in the world, but more than anything as a framework to help people start to think through how you can turn uncertainty into opportunity. The future isn’t written on this. It’s in our hands.
BRAD SMITH VO: That’s Ryan Roslansky, CEO of Linkedin and a Microsoft executive vice president. Ryan leads the LinkedIn platform that connects more than a billion professionals worldwide. Ryan and his colleague, Aneesh Raman, have written a new book. It’s called, “Open to Work.” A practical guide to navigating your career in the age of AI. We talk about AI’s potential impact on all our jobs and careers. It’s both a challenge and an opportunity. After all, the human brain pre-dates the Industrial Age by millennia, and human beings have shown an extraordinary ability to adapt to each technological advance. But to make the most of this opportunity we each need to combine a sense of where technology is going with practical advice. And Ryan has a lot of good practical advice to share. Including how to think about your current job, not as a title, but as a collection of tasks, and then use this understanding to build on your strengths and add to your skills. The future may be a lot more promising than you think, if we get this right. My conversation with Ryan Roslansky, up next on Tools and Weapons.
BRAD SMITH: Ryan, it’s great to sit down. I have been looking forward to this conversation for a long time, because you and your colleague, Aneesh Rahman, at LinkedIn have been working on a book that has now reached the shelf, Open to Work: How to Get Ahead in the Age of AI. I love the title because a lot of times, people are asking hard questions, like “Is there a way for me to get ahead?” “Will I be left behind?” You and Aneesh offer so many insights about where the world and where the world of AI are going.
RYAN ROSLANSKY: Thanks for having me, Brad. Thank you for the inspiration that you kind of gave to write the book as well. So, my colleague, Aneesh Raman and I – from LinkedIn, had the idea, basically to evolve what we’ve been doing for decades on the LinkedIn platform; a platform that exists to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce.
And right now, there’s a lot of uncertainty, a lot of anxiety with the world of work through AI. And while this is by no means a crystal ball to what the future of work holds, it is a starting point to start a discussion and to start giving people a framework for how they can think through what’s happening around them right now. How they can connect some of the dots that may be creating some of the anxiety or the uncertainty, and hopefully, then turn that uncertainty into opportunity.
And I think one of the most important things that I’ve thought about in writing this book and talking to people about it is the future isn’t written on this. It’s in our hands as workers, as employees, as companies, as economies, as societies, to figure this out together, to find the opportunity and to create a better world of work, moving forward. So, it’s exciting to get this book out there, and I look forward to talk to you about it.
BRAD SMITH: Well, I mean, one of the things I think your comments reflect is you or you and Aneesh really have, in many ways, some unique perspectives, I will say, uniquely broad perspectives, because of all of the data that you get from LinkedIn, from the LinkedIn economic graph, and not just the data about where the world is and where the world of work is today, but I think the perspective gained over time, because, as you say, for two decades, the world has been changing. Jobs have been changing. You all have been seeing those changes. So, now, as you put it, we look ahead.
Let me start with where you started in the book, the introduction. And I think you’ve already alluded to a little bit of this, but I even love the title, “Failure is not an option.” And what you start with is really the Apollo 13 story. Many people know it, either having read about it or watched the movie and other things, this extraordinary story of human ingenuity, people doing things that I don’t think they thought were necessarily possible, having to do them in a few days to keep three astronauts alive. And it really was about human ingenuity.
Why did you choose that as the story with which to begin?
RYAN ROSLANSKY: Yeah, that’s a great question. As you said. I mean, it’s this beautiful day in 1970. You have a set of astronauts that are taking the fifth trip to the moon. Things are going well, and out of nowhere in a quick stir of the oxygen tank, boom, and the astronauts start to realize that they are spewing oxygen out into space and send that now-famous message back to Mission Control, “Houston, we have a problem.”
And it was the flight director, Gene Krantz, who sat there in Mission Control, started to understand what was going on, and came to the conclusion that, “Everyone, stay calm, and let’s remember, failure is not an option.” And I think it just resonates so well at this moment in time, which is that when you’re hit with this uncertainty, you need to figure out what to do. This idea that we have to come together to figure this out, to use human ingenuity, to think creatively, is the right mental framework to be in.
This is a great example of: technology wasn’t going to solve this problem. This is a set of astronauts that had to make do with what was literally, what, right now, would look at, like, super antiquated technology that exists on this – on the spacecraft, literally, in certain cases, fit a square peg into a round hole and figure out a way to save themselves.
And it’s a bunch of people working together across different departments and agencies and in space and on the ground. And they succeeded, and they – they brought it together. They brought themselves home. And it’s just – it’s just a great, in my view, a great story for what happens when you realize failure is not an option. You bring human ingenuity to the forefront, and you’re able to do great things.
BRAD SMITH: One of the interesting threads that you pull on is this notion that we don’t know entirely where things are going, but that doesn’t mean it’s predetermined and that we don’t have agency. I have to admit I love this because, to be honest, I feel like it’s sometimes missing in our industry.
In the world of technology, people can be a futurist and make a lot of predictions about what is going to happen in five or 10 years. I don’t know that there’s a lot of accountability or even review.
I will admit, a few weekends ago, I was thinking about this, and I used the Researcher agent in Copilot. And I put in a lot of the names that everybody would recognize, and I asked for an assessment and a grade of all of the–I’ll just say, luminaries–and how well they did with their predictions about what would happen in defined periods of time. And almost everybody got between 20% and 30%.
RYAN ROSLANSKY: Wow.
BRAD SMITH: So, nobody got a passing grade, but rather than have people make fewer predictions, people just keep making them. But this is not what you guys do, you and Aneesh. In fact, what you say is:
“We won’t get a lot of these answers for some time, in some cases, decades. We don’t need these answers, however, to know what to do right now. The most important part of all – of all of this is that these answers are not predetermined. Nothing about this moment is where we go next comes down to one thing and one thing only. The choices we make right now as individuals, organizations, economies, societies…”
You use that to frame the mission and what you think the mission is for the two of you, as authors, really, in my view, the view of LinkedIn and Microsoft, about human innovation.
Can you say a little bit about how you think about human innovation? What is it and what is it that makes it most special?
RYAN ROSLANSKY:What makes so many of the – the greatest technology thinkers great is this idea of what the future can become.
And sometimes when you’re mired in the technology, and especially with AI, and you kind of draw out where – where this could potentially go, it leads you to some dark places, some uncertain places, sometimes. But oftentimes, that – that assumes that nothing else changes around it, that if we were all to stay in one place and not change and let the technology run wild, we could end up in a place that seems uncertain or scary to us.
I don’t believe in that. I believe that – that humans play such an integral role in shaping where that technology should go and understanding not only what technology can bring to bear on the – on the upside, but how people can adapt and evolve with that along the way as well.
So much of what’s exciting about AI, the AI that we use every day right now, is its ability to take certain tasks that has somehow felt mundane to us in the past, maybe we didn’t want to do them, and help us do them better, give us actually, more agency.
More importantly, I think we’re all starting to realize that the set of what we historically maybe called “soft skills”, which didn’t seem as important, these are really important, by the way: curiosity, courage, communication, compassion. Wow, these turn out to be some really, really important skills to do your job well.
And the focus and emphasis on those, along with the AI, is what I think gives us the opportunity to dream big and paint a much more positive picture that exists with humans and technology together moving forward.
BRAD SMITH: And as you say, you don’t have to know every step. No one knows every step they’re going to need to take. The most important thing is take the first step.
RYAN ROSLANSKY: That’s right.
BRAD SMITH: If you’re early in your career, if you’re later in your career, if you’re a parent wanting to think about what a career for your son or daughter might mean in the future, I think this book has very practical, helpful advice.
You have a title for a chapter, “Jobs are tasks, not titles.” But you do put tasks into different buckets. Can you say a little bit about the three buckets that you define?
RYAN ROSLANSKY: It was maybe two and a half or three years ago when you and I were first exposed as part of this great company to some of the groundbreaking AI moves.
And someone in a meeting said something like, “Well, where does this all go?” And off the cuff, you turned and said, “You know what? Everybody’s job is a set of tasks. And we need to look at it like that. And if your job is just – just a set of tasks that can be automated, you may need to start looking for a new job.”
And I mean, I remember writing that down really quickly when you said it, Brad, because it’s –
BRAD SMITH:(Laughter.) No recollection.
RYAN ROSLANSKY: That’s what I assumed.
BRAD SMITH:(Laughter.) I’m glad you took notes.
RYAN ROSLANSKY: It’s a really important framing, and it does start to give people something practical to think about, which is that historically, we’ve talked about what we do as a title. I’m a product manager. I’m a marketer. I’m a salesperson. It’s a great shorthand to basically bundle up what, at the end of the day, is a set of tasks to be done and how you communicate what you do.
It’s important for us to actually think about our jobs not as a title, but as that set of tasks, because the more that you think about it like that, the more you can start to realize that, “Wow, there are certain tasks that AI can do really well.” And that’s a great thing, but if my job is only a set of those tasks, I need to start thinking about what that means for me.
We bucket those tasks into three buckets. One, tasks that we feel pretty good that AI is going to automate those and can do a great job with them. “Summarize this document, translate this piece of text,” AI is going to be great at that.
The second bucket are those tasks that we feel like can really help augment what you do as a human being. So, AI can’t go all the way there, but they can really give you a superpower as you realize how to use them.
The last set of tasks, the third bucket, are those things that are so innately human or messy sometimes that we don’t believe that AI is going to be able to do those. When you’re in a meeting and people aren’t agreeing on something, and you have to get them to agree, or people who are different pages about the direction to go, and you’ve got to bring people together, talk about a strategy, the ability to really communicate and galvanize a group of people around going a certain direction. We bucket those into those tasks.
And then it’s a really easy exercise you can start to think about in your job. My goodness, like, “What do I do on a daily basis? And if I really boil that down, what percentage of my job fits in – fits into each of these buckets?”
Again, it’s not a crystal ball. It’s not the answer, but it’s a way to start thinking about, “Am I in a role right now that I need to be thinking about making a quick change, or am I in a role right now where, wow, I feel really insulated into the future, or am I in a role where, you know what, like most people are, some of my tasks are in this Bucket 1, some of them are Bucket 2, some of them, Bucket 3, and how can I be great at all of these?”
BRAD SMITH: When you think about, say, that just that dividing line between what you rely on AI to do versus what you’re now using AI to do, but you’re doing it with AI, how do you find that changing your own work?
RYAN ROSLANSKY: One of the greatest things that I’ve found so far with AI is having Copilot built directly into Outlook, and my ability to get this long email where people are debating something, and just say, “Hey, can you explain this to me really quick, like, what’s going on, or what do I need to do?” It’s a great way to come to speed quickly, on – on a discussion and understand some of the important-ness and nuances going on.
I’m not saying, hey, Copilot, respond to this or act on my behalf. I mean, there’s so much nuance in a lot of these discussions, and there’s so much – the decisions that I have to make before I can make a decision or reply to email, but I can save a good 10 to 15 minutes on a topic when I can just come up to speed really quickly. So, I love that.
And then the second thing that I’ve started to do quite frequently, I’ll be in a situation where I have to send an important email to you or to Satya, and I’ll ask Copilot, “Hey, how can I make this better, or what am I missing here?” I’m not asking to make a decision. I’m asking it to challenge me, or help me as a thought partner, to make a better end product that I’m trying to make a point on. A lot of these that I’m talking about, these are Bucket 2 tasks.
You feel like you have this superpower all of a sudden to – to kind of do more with AI. But it doesn’t just happen, and it does – you can’t just assume that you’re going to type something into some random AI and it’s going to be there for you and help you. There’s a lot of work and effort that goes into this and helping it become that thought partner for you.
BRAD SMITH: And your reference to curiosity, I mean, I felt for so long that that actually is the fundamental fuel for growth, for learning. But it is a bit of a craft, a bit of an art, even, to learn how to use AI.
And in – in your work, how are you seeing the development of that capability, that skill?
RYAN ROSLANSKY: I think everyone has their own approach to working with these tools, and I actually think that’s a great thing, because at the end of the day, to be building this thought partner with you, it has to become so personalized to you and who you are and how you work and think.
The LinkedIn feed these days is flooded with people who are so excited to share what they are doing or learning with the various AI products that they’re using. It’s symbolic of a couple of things.
Number one, people are trying a lot of different things in their flow of work.
BRAD SMITH: Right.
RYAN ROSLANSKY: And not all of them hit, but when they do, when you’re able to really find, like, a Bucket 2 task that makes sense, you’re so excited about it that you want to share it with the world.
Number two, the – the feedback that you see on these LinkedIn postslike, “Did you try this?” or, “Try it this way,” or, “Oh my goodness, I’m going to go and try that,” it kind of goes back to this human idea of, like, we’re all trying to figure this out together. And this building of a community around these topics and how you’re using it, it’s just really inspiring to watch people kind of motivating each other on and – and kind of talking about it and doing it.
BRAD SMITH: Anybody who’s been around computers for the last 10 or 20 or longer years knows, hey, some people, they were, like, PowerPoint or Excel wizards.
RYAN ROSLANSKY: Sure.
BRAD SMITH: They could do things with PowerPoint or Excel that most of us would go, wow, I wish I could do that.
RYAN ROSLANSKY: Yeah.
BRAD SMITH: I cannot. And it, in part, can be people get some formal courses. It can be online. It can be in some other format. It might be watching a video, might be LinkedIn Learning, or it might just be practice.
RYAN ROSLANSKY: Yeah.
BRAD SMITH: The same thing is happening here,even just being inside a team, the comparisons that people say, “Wait, how did you get it to do that?” What – and it often – what – how did you prompt it? How did you use it?
You think of writing as something that you would either do yourself or rely on. Maybe you take a shortcut, and you let Copilot or some other chatbot write for you, and it does a good job, but wow, I have been so struck when people really just work with it and they keep using it.
And one of my colleagues has a habit, when she gets something she doesn’t like. She says, “That’s terrible. (Laughter.) You’ve got to do that again.” And – and it’ll come back and say, “Yeah, you’re right. It’s terrible.” (Laughter.) It takes feedback better than maybe the – some of the humans we work with, but it is a skill.
RYAN ROSLANSKY: Yeah.
BRAD SMITH: And it is a skill, in part, honed through practice.
RYAN ROSLANSKY: We talk a lot in the book about this importance of a mindset shift of really adapting AI in your workflow or pushing yourself to adapt it. For the future of your career, it’s really important to be trying these tools and learning these tools as you would with any other skill. We live in this technology world, and it seems like, according to you and I, everyone in the world is using AI all day long. That’s not true.
RYAN ROSLANSKY: To really kind of push yourself to – to learn about it, read about it, try it out, I think that’s an important mindset shift that folks need to be making.
BRAD SMITH: You have this notion, Bucket 3, the tasks that are uniquely human and that, hence AI won’t do or can’t do.
For a huge number of jobs, there are significant parts of it that are uniquely human. If you just think about what it means to work in sales, every – every company that has a product has people who are in sales; to be a lawyer.
And so often, success turns on relationships that build trust. So much of the work that matters actually involves investments of time, of building relationships, of understanding other people.
And the more people can move tasks from Bucket 1 to Bucket 2, and then free up some more time for Bucket 3, which I think is, frankly, where we’re often the most time constrained. People are so busy, they think, “Wow, I – I could be a better manager of my team if I just had some more time to ask the people I work with, how are they doing? What’s up with their kids or their family?” And that is actually an important part of what it means, I think, to be successful.
So, I think it’s just a different way that you offer of reimagining a world of work that can be more meaningful if people figure out how to use AI the right way.
RYAN ROSLANSKY:These skills, they’re important, but they’ve historically been talked about as soft skills, and almost, like, put to the side that, like those don’t matter as much.
You’ve always kind of known they really matter, quite frankly. Like, having strong EQ in your job is – is a really important thing for many people, the fact that so many of these hard skills feel like they have the ability to be automated that now, all of a sudden, it’s this kind of the shining the light on the true importance of some of these soft skills.
If you think about, I mean think about your – your day today, or my day today, my goodness, like, the number of – (laughter) – number of times I’ve had to use some uniquely human skill around compassion, or EQ, or conflict mediation, or, I mean, these are – that’s what these jobs are. And to think that those aren’t important, I think, makes no sense, but to think that, wow, what will happen in a – in a professional world where people are actually much better at these skills and have really honed their craft on it, I think that it makes things a lot better.
BRAD SMITH: Most people, in some way, have jobs where at some point in time, you need people to bet on you, to trust you. And that usually comes with time well spent.
I also think this connects – you go from jobs to careers, and you have this phrase that really a career is not a ladder, maybe the way we’ve often thought about it, but a climbing wall.
Can you say a little more about that?
RYAN ROSLANSKY: Well, first and foremost, the most requested feature by far that I’ve seen in my time at LinkedIn is people say, “Hey, Ryan, LinkedIn has all this data. Can you can – you just use that data to show us exactly what career paths are supposed to be, or what they look like? I want to become a CFO. What am I supposed to do? Or I want to be a marketer. Where should I go to school now?”
And the truth is, you look at the data, and there is no such thing as a linear career path, you have to realize that you – you need to take your career into your own hands. We’re moving from just this idea of roles into specific tasks and the importance of those tasks, all of a sudden, this kind of linear thinking of – of a career or a hierarchy inside of a company starts to look a little bit different. And you need to be thinking about your career, less about “I need to be climbing this ladder or getting this new title or promotion”, and more about “What adjacent skills or tasks can I be picking up? What did I think I couldn’t do that now, if I really embrace AI, I can actually do more of that?”
It’s a reframing on what we’ve historically thought it meant to be in a career, or what a career was made up. We’re seeing phenomenal employees at LinkedIn or Microsoft or many companies, who historically may have thought that their path to success was, “I’m a great IC, and now I’m supposed to become a manager. Like, that’s what I’m supposed to do.
BRAD SMITH: Yeah.
RYAN ROSLANSKY: But now it’s like, “Wow, as an IC, I can leverage some of these AI tools, do many more things, get a lot more done, be more fulfilled in my in my life, and that’s what’s rewarded now. That’s what seems exciting, my ability to help my company in greater ways.”
These hierarchies are so embedded in the human psyche, and I don’t think these get changed overnight, but I am starting to see that trend. I think it’s important to think about, you know, I’m not just trying to be the next seniority or – or level, but I’m trying to expand my skill set. That’s going to be the path to success moving forward.
BRAD SMITH: As you get to this part of the book, you’re basically encouraging people to think about three questions as they think about their – their own careers and where they want to go.
The first one is: why do you work, the whys. Say a little bit about that question, and why you make that the first question.
RYAN ROSLANSKY: I don’t want to discount that the answer to many people to that question is, I need – I need to live, I need money to live. And I think that that’s fair, but – and – and really important, but I think it’s – it’s a great place to start, which is inside of myself, like, why am I doing this? Like, what do I care about? What is going to make me get out of bed every day? What is motivating me?
And I think that then helps you make the next decisions in what you should be trying to do or learn in your career.
BRAD SMITH: But it also connects within your second question, which I think is even more perhaps beneficial for people as they’re really trying to think about themselves, which is, what do you uniquely do? How do you think about that question?
RYAN ROSLANSKY: I want to have a fulfilling career, if I want to be able to leverage those skills and tasks that I know how to do, in a – in a – in a world where some of these bucket one tasks may become more commoditized, like what is it unique about me that helps me stand out in this field?
What are those human skills that you uniquely bring? What are those other skills and tasks that you uniquely know how to do, with or without AI tools, to paint a picture that’s more at a task-based level than on a role-based level. And again, I think it’s just more of this mentality shift from roles to tasks.
BRAD SMITH: And then you go to the third question: where do you want to go? How do you and Aneesh think about that question, and how people best think about it for themselves?
RYAN ROSLANSKY: I think the good thing is that if you’re able to answer one and two, you know, it starts to give you a – a pretty good ability to feel like you have agency over what number three looks like.
Again, to so many people, you know, careers and jobs, it feels like a black box that someone else is taking care of this for me. “I get on some path, and – and again, that’s how it’s supposed to work.”
In reality, no, no. You have to take it into your own hands. You have to take that agency of what you want to become into your own hands by, again, going back to “Why am I doing this? You know, what is unique to me?”
And then with those two questions, I think you’re really able to answer, you know, a variety of ways that you can go with your career that match those two things that will then end up with something that’s fulfilling and unique to you. So many people end up in jobs that are not what they meant to be – they’re not they’re meant to be doing. They don’t enjoy doing them,
And I think if you can really foundationally end up principally with those first two questions, it will lead to a much more fulfilling career, especially in a time where it feels like there’s so much uncertainty, and you don’t have control of it. You do have control of it, but you have to put in the time and the effort and the work to really ground yourself in those principles and those questions to know which way to go.
BRAD SMITH: There’s also this really terrific logical flow in your book: “Understand the impact of the technology.” The part we’ve just talked about sort of that comes after that is actually the “Know yourself, think about why you do what you do, how – what’s uniquely your strength.”
Then it goes to the – a third part, which is putting it in the context of the world as a whole, where economies are going, which I think is helpful as well. And you entitle the chapter, “Economies Need Innovation from All for All.”
What do you and Aneesh, mean by that?
RYAN ROSLANSKY: I think if you start with the mindset that there is a very positive future of the world of work, and you think about what some of these AI tools can go and do and unleash for the world, there’s some really positive outcomes to all of this.
I have a 20-year-old daughter who for much of her life has been really focused on, “Dad, how can I make an impact on climate change? It feels like there’s nothing that can be done here.”
Now the conversations we have are more like, oh, you know, these tools are going to be so powerful that some of these really important questions in the world, like climate change and health care and poverty, we may be able to find step change breakthroughs in solving some of these problems. When you look at it through that lens, all of a sudden, it becomes so inspiring what can happen.
And then you take the logical steps back to say, okay, well, what needs to happen to get there? It requires these strong partnerships between the public sector, the private sector, the infrastructure that needs to exist in the world to allow some of this prosperity to flourish, the skilling that needs to exist to help people learn what they can do with these tools.
There’s so much at the foundational level of work that needs to be done that can’t just be done by individuals or companies, but needs to be done by kind of, you know, schools and governments and everyone involved. But when you – when you put yourself in that mindset, wow, how exciting can this be?
BRAD SMITH: That almost brings us back to where we began, talking about an outlook on the future, and this, you know, should we be optimistic, should we be pessimistic, should we be excited, should we be anxious?
The first thing I would note is even if AI may automate or make it possible to automate many of the tasks in your work, what you do is more than just the sum of the tasks. We at Microsoft see so much about how great AI tools are automating coding. The job of a software engineer is not going away, but it is changing.
RYAN ROSLANSKY: The data that we have right now on LinkedIn, we’re seeing an increase in the number of software engineer postings that are happening right now on LinkedIn.
BRAD SMITH: And it – and it feels like that should be ironic, but it’s not necessarily at all.
RYAN ROSLANSKY: Exactly. Exactly. When you think about the power that comes through the creation, you know, through software engineering, now that ability that can be in more people’s hands is actually really, really exciting.
But to your point, the job is changing. Take the job of a product manager, where historically, what you used to spend a lot of your time on was number one, talking to customers to understand the problem, most important. Number two, writing a bunch of, you know, specs to hand over to engineers about how the product should look, how the features should come together, how we’re going to measure success, etcetera, and then help manage the kind of project to be done.
Directionally, that job is still the same today, except that second step is different. You’re still out talking to a lot of customers. But the next thing you’re doing is actually you’re writing a bunch of evals for the model. It’s not an antiquated –
BRAD SMITH: Explain what an eval is for people who are not familiar.
RYAN ROSLANSKY: Exactly, yes, for most people, it’s the idea that a customer has this need. We have to help our product, which is an AI-enabled, model-driven product, to fulfill that customer need.
So, I need to help teach the AI through what we call evals, so a scenario, the product needs to do this, and the AI needs to respond like this. I need to teach it how to do that in order to fulfill that customer need.
A product manager’s job is still talking to a customer. It’s still writing something that looks like a spec. The spec now is just a set of like, if this scenario, here’s a good or bad response, if this scenario, here’s a good or bad response, and helping to train the model to help the customer do their job, still working in the process.
So ,it’s not like the job is going away, but it is changing, and the product managers, who are really succeeding in their careers right now are the ones that are embracing, you know, that AI eval loop, and really understanding it, how it works and in the flow.
So, I think everyone’s job is changing, and in fact, it’s not a new thing. If you look over the past eight years alone on LinkedIn, you take the average role, eight years ago, the average role, this is not even an AI-related comment, the skills required to do that job over the past eight years have changed by 25%, and we expect that by 2030 they will change by 70%. So, even if you’re not changing your job, your job is changing on you, and quite frankly, that’s always been the case through history. It may just be accelerated now in the AI age.
BRAD SMITH: The other point that you make in the book is that there’s probably more premium and opportunity in the future for cross-disciplinary work, you know, the ability to combine, you know, what might be a specialist but with also, you know, the ability to think across specialties.
Do you see that actually becoming one of the soft skills that’s more necessary or in demand or valuable because of AI?
RYAN ROSLANSKY: I think a couple things there. You know, first, and we’ve tried this inside of the LinkedIn company over the past year, and it’s been really exciting to see. Historically, we have siloed roles in the software production process. I talked about one just a second ago, of a product manager, but in that process you also have a product market, or a designer, a front-end engineer, to create, you know, part of the LinkedIn product.
What we’ve learned is that when you enable people to use, you know, some of these great AI tools, oftentimes people are able to do many more of those tasks that are required in those siloed roles.
So, we tried something recently. We created a role at LinkedIn, which is called a builder. And historically, you think of it as those four roles, and now it’s just this one role, with a great set of AI tools that enable you to build a product from start to finish, leveraging a lot of the insight typically held siloed in those roles.
When roles are siloed, it requires a communication path, and that takes time to do and build. When you can enable a single builder with the ability to do this, they can do things much more frequently.
For a company like LinkedIn, like the speed and the quality of the decisions to make and get a product out there are really all that matters. We try a lot of things, and we test it, and we pull a lot of things back. So, enabling this new class of builders to go and build more things and test more things helps our company to thrive.
Quite frankly, it doesn’t mean anyone’s role is going away. We’re making more builders. And we’ve created a new program at LinkedIn for associate builders, people who are just maybe coming out of college, maybe not even going to college at all, but are proficient in building things and understanding these tools as a new way of entry-level work to come into our company, because it’s so valuable for what we need right now at LinkedIn. I think we’ll see a lot of roles start to change like that as well, again not something going away, but adapting the way that work is done to help a company succeed.
BRAD SMITH: Well, one of the things I love about that, and even though you say a job is not a title, and as somebody who didn’t major in computer science, if I could choose between being a coder and a builder, I think it’s pretty cool to be a builder.
RYAN ROSLANSKY: Builder sounds great, yeah.
BRAD SMITH: So, let’s conclude with what I think is maybe the – I’ll call it the emerging great debate in the tech sector, I might even argue the emerging great debate for this century as a whole: what are we trying to do? Are we trying to use AI to outperform people, or are we trying to use AI to help people develop the capacity to do more in work with their lives in a – in short, help people perform at a higher level?
I actually think there’s a bit of a schism in the tech sector. If you just look at what people have as their mission, you know, or just their great quest, you know, there are some who say, “No, we are in search of AGI.” What is AGI? Well, there are differing definitions, but they say “It is the ability, you know, to have some autonomous system that can outperform humans at, say, most economically valuable work.”
Or you have our mission, which is basically to create technology that empowers people to do more, to achieve more, to be more that they want to be. Those are two very different visions of what different companies are trying to accomplish.
I still remember when LinkedIn and Microsoft came together, and part of the conversation was Satya Nadella and Jeff Weiner realizing that the two companies had very similar mission statements.
So, as we look at the future, you uniquely, you’ve – you’ve had this experience at LinkedIn, you’ve been part of Microsoft, you look to the future, what do you hope we will do with AI for people in the world?
RYAN ROSLANSKY: One of the most important reasons that Aneesh and I felt like we needed to write this book right now is to, more than anything, start the discussion and help people to start understanding what’s going on.
The reason that I work at LinkedIn, the reason that I work at Microsoft is because of the missions of these companies. Like, LinkedIn is a platform for 1.3 billion professionals around the world to find economic opportunity. It has been that way for 20 years. And through different economic changes, through COVID, we’ve been there as a platform to help people navigate their careers, through their community, through how they learn new skills, through how they adapt as human beings.
And I think now more than ever, people need to be understanding and having these discussions. Again, and it’s not just, unfortunately, up to some tech companies or you and I, but it’s governments, it’s economies, it’s educational institutions, to really paint a positive future for what this can all mean.
AI is an enabler for us to do bigger and better things as a society, but we have to be thoughtful about the approach and how we get there. Everyone has to have a framework, so they’re – you know, can – can deal with the uncertainty and the messy middle we’re going through to how to navigate it right now.
But my goodness, if we are able, and when we’re able to navigate through it, to give humans these superpowers to enable and to do more than they ever thought possible, I think we’re going to end up in a pretty special place. I know you share the same thought as well, and that’s why you’re here.
BRAD SMITH: Every book is an argument, every book starts a conversation. And I think the book that you and Aneesh have written really is about two conversations. One is, how can an individual or a parent coaching a kid or somebody who’s 20 years into their career and looks ahead to another 20, get some practical advice and think in some new and helpful ways? In this changing time, how can individuals use AI to be more successful in so many ways?
But there’s a second argument you’re making as well, that there is a path. If we put our minds to it, and we appreciate that we will decide the future as people, machines won’t decide it, people will, there is a path, where, as a society, we can use AI to fashion a broader and better future for lots of people. And it’s not about being replaced by machines. It’s by using this to achieve things that we couldn’t otherwise contemplate.
I think you and Aneesh together have written a book that creates the basis for these conversations. I think it’s the conversations that people want to have, but more than that, I think it’s the conversations that we need to have.
And I’ll say, it helps reinforce what all of us who work here at Microsoft and LinkedIn, this is why we joined these companies in the first place. It’s why we’re still here today, because we actually want to see technology do good for people, and I think you show us how.
So, thank you very much.
RYAN ROSLANSKY: Thanks, Brad. Appreciate it.