LinkedIn: Have we underestimated the most powerful business platform on the planet?
When looking at how AI systems decide which content to trust when answering questions about businesses, industries and professional expertise. Before long, I kept finding myself back in the same place.
LinkedIn was founded in 2003 by Reid Hoffman and co-founders Allen Blue, Konstantin Guericke, Eric Ly and Jean-Luc Vaillant. Its original purpose was to create an online professional network that enabled individuals to build their professional presence, connect with peers and showcase their experience.
Over the years, the platform has encouraged professionals to demonstrate their expertise through their experience, qualifications, recommendations and thought leadership. What initially started as a trusted place to connect with colleagues and endorse people you had worked alongside has evolved into something significantly more powerful.
In 2016, Microsoft acquired LinkedIn for approximately $26.2 billion. At the time, many questioned why Microsoft would invest so heavily in what was widely perceived to be a recruitment platform. However, I think Microsoft recognised something that many of us overlooked.
LinkedIn was no longer simply a professional networking platform. It had become one of the world's largest repositories of professional knowledge and business intelligence.
The platform provides a continually evolving picture of the global workforce. It reveals where people work, where industries are growing, the skills organisations are recruiting for and how businesses are evolving. Unlike traditional datasets, LinkedIn is continually maintained by its own users. Every promotion, qualification, career move and business update contributes to an ever-growing professional graph that reflects the state of the global economy in near real time.
For me, this is LinkedIn's real superpower.
The platform isn't valuable because of its technology alone; it is valuable because of the information contributed by millions of professionals every day.
The introduction of job postings in 2005 fundamentally changed recruitment. According to Mikko Antila's article, The History of LinkedIn – All Those Things You Wanted to Know, this functionality helped LinkedIn grow to more than six million users and transformed the way organisations identified and recruited talent.
Recruitment, however, was only the beginning.
Today, LinkedIn has become a platform for knowledge sharing, thought leadership, community building and professional learning. Organisations are increasingly using the platform to host live events, publish industry insight and engage directly with their audiences.
For example, SoDA Series Live hosts regular interviews with leaders across the digital industry:
https://www.linkedin.com/events/7479967791446380544/
Similarly, organisations such as Bird & Bird use LinkedIn Events to share expertise and connect with professional audiences:
https://www.linkedin.com/events/7486019072787406848/
These examples demonstrate that LinkedIn is no longer simply a social media platform; it has become a professional publishing platform where organisations can build authority, engage with their communities and establish themselves as trusted voices within their sectors.
This raises an important question. If LinkedIn has become such a powerful business platform, are organisations and individuals really using it to its full potential?
I don't believe they are.
Many businesses still see LinkedIn primarily as a recruitment tool or somewhere to publish occasional company updates. However, the platform now offers significantly more value. It enables organisations to demonstrate expertise, educate audiences, build relationships and establish credibility long before a commercial conversation begins.
As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly integrated into search and knowledge discovery, LinkedIn's influence extends even further.
Microsoft has integrated LinkedIn data across its wider ecosystem, including Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365 and Copilot, enabling professional insights to enhance productivity tools and enterprise applications. More importantly, LinkedIn's structured professional data provides an invaluable source of information for AI systems seeking trusted signals of expertise.
Industry research also suggests that LinkedIn is increasingly cited by generative AI platforms, including ChatGPT and Google AI, for professional and B2B topics. Long-form articles, newsletters and expert commentary are becoming high-authority assets that contribute not only to human understanding but also to the knowledge models used by AI systems.
This changes how we should think about LinkedIn.
Your profile is no longer simply an online CV.
Your articles are no longer written solely for your network.
Your newsletters are no longer just another marketing channel.
Collectively, they contribute to your professional authority, your digital reputation and increasingly the knowledge ecosystem that both people and AI rely upon.
Perhaps this explains Microsoft's vision back in 2016. They weren't simply acquiring a social network; they were acquiring the world's largest professional knowledge graph.
The question is no longer whether your business should have a presence on LinkedIn.
The question is whether you are contributing enough value to become part of the conversations, communities and knowledge that will shape how both people and AI discover expertise in the future.