AiThority Interview with Abhishek Shrivastava, VP of Product at LinkedIn

Hi, Abhishek. Welcome to the AiThority Interview Series. Please tell us about your current role at LinkedIn.

I’m the VP of Product Management for LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, where I lead a team that builds products that help B2B marketers connect with buyers, reach new audiences, and unlock opportunities. As B2B marketers continue to face long purchase cycles, a shifting privacy landscape and continued economic uncertainty, our role in creating solutions to help them build their brands and reach decision makers in new ways has never been more important.

Generative AI for content and image creation is taking the industry by storm. What are the unique business scenarios where generative AI can be truly effective in marketing and sales? 

The number of touch-points and amount of data marketers can collect across the funnel are increasing. With only 5% of buyers in-market to make a purchase at any given time–and even fewer in an economic downturn–AI can help marketers identify and scale the right content for the right buyer at the right time along their buying journey, which can convert them to make a purchase faster. Generative AI can reduce the heavy work required for image creation and also help with customizing post-click experiences for better results.

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What are the invisible challenges of getting started with generative AI tools? 

We surveyed nearly 2,000 B2B marketing leaders across the globe for our new 2023 B2B Marketing Benchmark, and found that aside from finding and acquiring customers, the biggest challenge facing CMOs is incorporating emerging technology, like AI, into their marketing strategies. The use of generative AI is rapidly growing–and we’re just beginning to understand the opportunities ahead of us. Whether you’re part of a small business or enterprise, we’re learning as we go. We’re putting the technology in the hands of our members and customers to help them reduce the time they’re spending on routine tasks, so that they can focus on the more strategic aspects of their job to be more productive and successful in their work.

My suggestion to marketers will be to not be afraid of trying things out and have a learning mindset.

Please tell us about LinkedIn’s AI Copy Suggestions. How does it help Marketing teams scale their content production goals? 

AI plays a foundational role in connecting marketers, sellers and buyers across our platform. While AI is taking the industry by storm now – it’s not new for us at LinkedIn. We’ve used it for years to help marketers reach the right audiences at the right time, measure conversions with accuracy, train our bidding models, and aggregate signals–like intent–to help reach buyers.

According to our B2B Marketing Benchmark, we know that 55% of marketers plan to use generative AI to increase their efficiency so they can focus on higher value work. We developed AI Copy Suggestions that use advanced OpenAI GPT models to leverage data from LinkedIn Pages and Campaign Manager settings, like objective, targeting criteria and audience, to suggest ad headlines and copy to help marketers jump-start their campaigns and create more content in less time. It’s no secret that marketers are stretched to do more with fewer resources while continuing to drive ROI for their companies. We created the tool to help them jumpstart their creativity and reduce the time they spend on day-to-day tasks so that they can continue to focus on building their brands.

What are the true performance benchmarks to measure the effectiveness and quality of AI-generated content for marketing? How do you measure these at LinkedIn? 

It’s getting harder for marketers to prove that their strategy is working amidst an incredibly complex and group-based purchase cycle. We understand these challenges and are working alongside our customers to build measurement solutions to help them continue to map their campaigns to business revenue.

We are closely monitoring metrics like click-through and engagement rates for customers that use AI-generated copy, which can help them make data-backed decisions based on how the content is performing. We also created the CMO Scorecard, a tool that attaches quantitative results to brand advertising, to help marketers understand the creative, media, and outcome metrics they should measure to show the effectiveness of their brand marketing, so that they can continue to drive campaigns that impact the bottom line.

What’s next in LinkedIn’s Gen AI roadmap? How do you plan to generate more revenue using AI and deep learning capabilities? 

We’re always thinking about ways to augment what buyers and sellers can accomplish with AI and are continuing to infuse the technology into our solutions to help them focus on higher value tasks. We’re excited about our path forward and believe that we’re uniquely positioned to help B2B professionals connect to create content, up-level their creativity, and be more efficient in developing campaigns that resonate.

This is the beginning of our journey with GAI—there’s so much opportunity ahead, and we’re looking forward to sharing more about our plans later this year.

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Thank you, Abhishek! That was fun and we hope to see you back on aithority.com soon.