Today, LinkedIn announced AI-powered people search, designed to make the search process faster, smarter, and more intuitive for LinkedIn members. Check out Wenjing Zhang's article to learn how our engineers built this new search experience to handle both scale and complexity!
Finding the right person on LinkedIn just got a whole lot easier and smarter. AI-powered people search lets members move beyond rigid keywords and search with natural language like “People who invest in women-led climate startups” to instantly discover relevant people. Behind the scenes, we built on the success of AI-powered job search and reimagined our people search stack with intelligent query routing, a GPU-optimized index for real-time responses, and fine-tuned small language models that rank not just relevance, but engagement – all while delivering an unbelievable 10× boost in efficiency throughput. In this article, I share how we built it and the key lessons from bringing AI-powered people search to our 1.3+ billion members to help them connect, collaborate, and grow.