Microsoft Corporation (MSFT) BofA Securities 2024 Global Technology Conference (Transcript)

Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) BofA Securities 2024 Global Technology Conference Call June 6, 2024 1:00 PM ET

Company Participants

Ryan Roslansky – Chief Executive Officer, LinkedIn

Unidentified Analyst

We are fortunate to have Ryan Roslansky here, CEO of LinkedIn. Ryan, thank you for joining us.

Ryan Roslansky

I feel like I should stand up.

Unidentified Analyst

Yeah.

Ryan Roslansky

Sorry.

Unidentified Analyst

Absolutely. Thanks for coming to the conference. We’re looking forward to the discussion here and a lot of exciting things that LinkedIn is in the middle of. So, thanks again.

Ryan Roslansky

Wonderful. You bet.

Question-and-Answer Session

Q – Unidentified Analyst

Great. Well, why don’t we just start, Ryan, on your role? You’ve been CEO for four years at LinkedIn. And maybe if you want to just talk about the evolution of LinkedIn under the four years? We could just start with just your role in general and your areas of responsibility for LinkedIn and how it’s been over the four years of your leadership?

Ryan Roslansky

That’s great. Thanks, again, for having me here today. Hello, everyone. Maybe for some context, I’ve been at LinkedIn now for 15 years. Been fortunate to literally work on every single part and component of LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a unique product. At the core, we run a social network, and then we run five distinct businesses through and around that network and have had the pleasure to both create and [Technical Difficulty] every single part of that throughout my tenure at LinkedIn.

Four years ago, Satya asked me to be the CEO of LinkedIn. It’s been quite a ride. We were acquired by Microsoft roughly eight years ago, and the thesis of that acquisition was to help LinkedIn grow by keeping LinkedIn completely independent. And it’s a unique operating model. I’m fortunate to attend Satya’s staff meetings on Fridays, et cetera, but for the most part, we operate as an independent company completely inside of Microsoft.

And over the past four years, we’ve been fortunate to — LinkedIn is a 21-year-old company. Over the past four years though, we’ve more than doubled the business, size of the business. Member base is now north of 1 billion members with seven members that are joining LinkedIn every second. It’s very rare for a consumer Internet company to see this level of growth after two decades. So, we’re very excited about the role LinkedIn plays in the world.

And more than anything, be it due to COVID or digital transformation or a Fourth Industrial Revolution, jobs are being created and displaced at record pace right now across the world. And to build a platform that helps people manage their career, upskill, make connections, find jobs, hire is both a really great business for us but also a really valuable thing, an exciting thing to be working on to help the world navigate, will most likely be a bit of a labor transition through this AI revolution.

Unidentified Analyst

Wonderful. Thank you. $16 billion business, LinkedIn. Could you just help us break down the major lines of business within LinkedIn? And, yeah, just start there.

Ryan Roslansky

Yeah. So, I think trailing 12 months, we’re at that $16 billion mark. And the way that LinkedIn works is look at the core, we build a professional network where people sign up. They have a profile. They make connections. It’s your digital resume online. When someone looks you up in the world, they’re probably going to look at your LinkedIn profile.

And so, the core of what we do, the most important thing is to ensure that we have a valuable and vibrant product for people to establish their identity, make connections on LinkedIn. On top of that, we allow people to share knowledge through a feed of typical products that you’d see in other social networks. And that’s kind of the core of what matters at LinkedIn.

From that profile data, from that engagement, we’re then able to drive valuable businesses on top of it. So, the first space that we look at is the broader talent space, where we sell solutions to help companies hire people or to train people. So, we call that talent. It’s hiring and learning. That’s north of $7 billion a year in revenue for us.

Then we have an advertising business on top of all that engagement and profile data as well. It’s very focused on B2B. We’re the definitive B2B marketing platform that exists if you want to target a set of CFOs that live in San Francisco, that are in the healthcare industry, there’s no better place to do that on LinkedIn. So, we both enjoy really high ad rates as well as really high ROI from B2B customers. That’s north of $5 billion business for us and growing well.

We have a sales insights business, so similar to our hiring solutions, a product called Sales Navigator, which allows people to better understand what’s happening inside of the LinkedIn network, better understand the potential customer and existing clients. Let’s say that someone you sell to at a company, they just moved jobs. We’ll help you understand what’s going on in that company, who you should reach out to, et cetera. That’s north of $1 billion business for us right now.

And last but not least, we allow all consumers, the 1 billion consumers across LinkedIn, to subscribe to premium services inside of our core consumer app. Better job-seeking features, better messaging features, et cetera. And as we recently announced, that’s north of a $2 billion business for us.

So that’s roughly the way that the business breaks down.

Unidentified Analyst

Wonderful. Great. Thank you. And LinkedIn is kind of unique, it’s a social media platform for professionals. So, who do you view as competitors to LinkedIn when you think of the landscape?

Ryan Roslansky

I mean, I guess, at our core, there’s no direct competitor that’s both a social network and in all the businesses that we’re in. We have a ton of competition, obviously, at the individual line of business level. And as it relates to social networks in general, there’s obviously a lot of competition there. We spend a ton of time and effort to really focus on making LinkedIn be the place for professionals, professional activity, focused on your job, on your career, on professional networking. So, kind of at the core, that’s the most important thing that I focus on.

I would say, the competition that I would worry about over time would be a world where people don’t make a distinction between social and professional. So, for example, if you believe that you could do everything you needed to do to be successful in your career on TikTok, then I would start to see that as a competitive threat to the core of what LinkedIn is. But for the most part, even Gen Z, Gen Alpha, we continue to see them making that distinction between personal and professional. And it’s even while LinkedIn is growing faster than it ever has right now, which is really great. So that’s how I think about the competitive landscape.

And then, obviously, I mean in the talent space, we have — there’s a ton of companies that are selling recruiting solutions, in the learning space as well. In advertising, there’s no one squarely focused on B2B like we are. But obviously, B2B advertising can exist across the entire landscape.

So there’s a ton of competition on the outskirts, but in the core of what we do, there’s no one that kind of covers everything like that.

Unidentified Analyst

Wonderful. Great. The world of work is really transforming here with AI. Would love to get your perspective on the impact to the industry and how is LinkedIn infusing AI into the platform. Where do you see the opportunities for LinkedIn?

Ryan Roslansky

Yeah. I mean, there’s a couple of really important thoughts on this one. So first, one of the things I don’t know if people really understand about LinkedIn is that underneath LinkedIn is we call it the Economic Graph. There’s a super vibrant network of data that’s happening. So, this graph updates north of 5 million times per minute with people changing jobs, updating their profile, a new company posting a job, someone adding a skill, someone adding a learning course. There’s just a ton of data that’s happening underneath LinkedIn, which gives us really valuable insights into what is happening across the global labor market at any given time.

And I mean, there’s probably three things that I’m paying attention to right now. Number one, Satya Nadella and I, we were on GMA together, Good Morning America together, a few weeks ago, where we released a study that 75% of members across LinkedIn and across the Microsoft suite of tools right now say they use GenAI in their job. 75%, which is pretty remarkable. The majority of these people are doing this what we call like bring your own AI right now. It kind of reminds me of like early days of having a smartphone when people would bring their own smartphone into work and they’d try and hook it up to the systems inside of the company and it was a little bit chaotic. I think the next couple of years, we’re going to start to see both companies embracing, obviously, AI much greater for productivity inside of the company, but really need to do it in a very secure way. So that’s kind of one of the trends that I’m paying a lot of attention to.

Number two, if you think about jobs, everyone’s job in this room, your job, my job, everyone’s job, fundamentally, is a set of tasks that need to be done. And when you look at the world through that lens, we can take everyone’s job, break it into a set of tasks, then understand what tasks have a high likelihood of being impacted by AI, either completely automatable or not automatable at all or slightly automatable, et cetera. And when you run that math, there’s two insights.

Number one, if your job is just a set of automatable tasks, like you should be looking for a new job. And it’s our — I feel like I have a responsibility and a duty to help the world for folks in those jobs understand like, “Hey, your job can be automated and let’s help you find the skills you need to move into a different job.” The majority of jobs in the world obviously are not completely automatable. But what we do predict is that between now and 2030, on average, 70% of the tasks or skills that you have in your job will change. So that could be as little as needing to learn how to use certain copilots, et cetera, or learning different skills in prompt engineering. But I do believe that we’re going to start to see a real shift in the skills that are necessary to be successful in everyone’s job between now and 2030. So, there’s that happening.

And then maybe less AI-related but something that I know a lot of people frequently ask me about the data that we see, two things on remote jobs is really fascinating right now. So, pre-pandemic, there’s — at any given time, there’s 15 million, 20 million jobs that are posted on LinkedIn actively. And pre-pandemic, it was roughly 2% of all jobs on the platform were remote jobs. If you go back two-and-a-half years ago, it peaked. 20%, 21% of all jobs on LinkedIn were remote jobs, which is pretty insane to see that jump from 2% to 21%. And now that number is back to 8%, so it kind of peaked up and now it’s starting to come back down again. So, we pay a lot of attention to kind of how the labor market is shifting through remote work, and it seems like that trend is coming down.

And the second thing I’m paying a lot of attention to right now is I watch this stat, which is the frequency with which the member base changes jobs on LinkedIn. And if you go back two-and-a-half years, we all remember, I think it was in the Great Reshuffle, Great Resignation, just a ton of movement, people changing jobs. That really leveled off the past two years. But if you look at the past maybe four months, it’s really starting to pick up again. So, I’m not saying we’re going into another Great Resignation or anything like that, but for the first time in two years, we are starting to see people moving jobs more frequently again. I think people were sheltering in place for a while, so we’re starting to pay a lot of attention to that.

Unidentified Analyst

Wonderful. Great. Thank you for that. And so, you identified some of the key trends in the industry from AI and just general trends. How is LinkedIn addressing some of those trends?

Ryan Roslansky

First and foremost, it’s inside of our products. So, again, playing out Satya’s thesis that LinkedIn can grow well inside of Microsoft, I think one of the most valuable things was while most companies are trying to figure out what does AI mean, if you go back a year-and-a-half ago, as part of Microsoft, we were squarely in the middle of — on the bleeding edge actually of that trend. So, I would say a year ago, I took a pretty aggressive left turn in the roadmap for the company of LinkedIn in our products and said, “Hey, we are going to fully embrace embedding GenAI into everything that we’re doing.” So, we’re fortunate we have access to all this stuff through Azure and all the great models through Azure. So, we have a great competitive advantage there.

And then, we have to learn. So, across all of our products that I talked about, our feed to our advertising tools, to our job tools, et cetera, we took the entire R&D org and started to push GenAI through these products. And quite frankly, we failed a ton in the beginning. And — but that was a really important means to an end to start to find some real product market fit and some real success in all the products that we’re building. It’s a new paradigm. It’s a new technology, primitive, and I think a lot of companies are going to go through this period of like how does this work? How do I use this? But then, when you figure it out, I mean, there’s real upside to it.

So, some examples that we have, the most important things that people need to do on LinkedIn is you create a profile on LinkedIn and it asks you a question, which is like, “Hey, write a summary about yourself.” It’s really hard. It’s really hard, especially for a younger generation, for people that don’t feel confident about themselves. Now you can push a button and it can scan over the rest of your profile, what you’ve done, and help you write a really valuable summary about who you are and help to keep your profile up-to-date and help you looking good. That’s so meaningful, because more valuable data in our profiles, more people engage with their profile helps our business, but also helps these people feel more comfortable about their ability to show up the right way in the workplace.

We launched an advertising tool where — advertising on LinkedIn is pretty special. The coverage rates, the CPMs, they’re really, really high, because the profile data is so valuable for B2B marketers to target against. But it’s also complex. You’re trying to create a marketing campaign and you’re like, oh, I can — wow, I can actually put an ad in front of like this cohort of people and what should I say. It’s a really complex thing to set up. We built an AI tool, it’s called Accelerate, where you just put in the URL of what you’re trying to market. We create the campaign for you. We create the targeting for you. We create the budgeting for you. Obviously, it’s all in your control. There’s a Copilot where you can measure and manage it. But what typically went from a four-hour process to really set up a valuable campaign on LinkedIn now is literally like a 30-second process. Just put in the URL and we’ll help you. And then, on average, folks that are using this tool are seeing a 60% increase in ROI by using that instead of setting the campaigns up manually. So, that’s pretty exciting.

We set out to say, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool and aspire to give every professional in the world a career coach?” Literally, someone you could talk to that could help you navigate your career. Should I apply to this job? How do I make myself look good for this job? What are things that I should do to update my profile? And we launched a product called Coach, literally called Coach on LinkedIn. It’s a premium product, part of our premium subscription, where it knows you extremely well based on your LinkedIn profile. It knows what’s happening across LinkedIn Economic Graph and is there to help you navigate your career.

I talked about the fact that our premium business is now a $2 billion business, our online subscription business. A lot of that is due to the fact that people find a lot more value in these AI tools right now. So, we’re seeing a lot of growing momentum there. But across the entire suite, we really lean in to ensure that we could help our members be more productive and successful through these tools. And again, like any company out there, the key is I got to figure out how to use it. And then, it’s not cheap. I have to find a business model that supports it. So, I think we’ve really found that through our advertising platform, through our subscription products. And obviously, our recruiting tools, which will enable a recruiter to be much more effective and productive at their job to find candidates is where we see a lot of future upside as well. So, really excited about that from the product suite.

And then, the last thing I will say, just because I feel really passionate about it, it’s important, I alluded to it before, but we’re working with governments across the world and companies, et cetera, to leverage this data that we have, which is, hey, here’s how we think the labor market is going to transition and shift over the next decade, to help create training programs in countries or work with governments to ensure that they have access to the skills that are necessary for their country to be successful in an AI revolution. So, we’re spending a lot of time taking the data and then using it to help the world make sense of what may be a bit of an uncertain future.

Unidentified Analyst

Wonderful. Great. Thank you so much. Why don’t we shift to the membership base of LinkedIn? How would you describe the health of that? And what are some initiatives underway to drive growth?

Ryan Roslansky

So, with 1 billion members and seven members growing per second, signing up per second, a lot of that growth is happening outside of the United States. So, we have to ensure that our product works really well in other countries, that’s been a large focus just foundationally to get the translation and standardization to work across all languages. It’s been a big focus.

I would say, one of the most important things we’ve been focusing on is just creating a very high-quality content creation and consumption experience. We actually very purposely call it — we build the knowledge marketplace, which is how do we help 1 billion members on LinkedIn take the knowledge that’s inside of their head. All of you in this room have so awesome knowledge that you’ve learned like through your careers and what you know. And how do we take that and help you look better and establish your reputation on LinkedIn by sharing content and then match it to people who could find a lot of value in knowing and learning what you know and doing that at massive scale. That creates the feed that we have, even leaning more heavily into short-form video is a medium in that feed. But both — professionals need to stay up to speed on what’s going on in their industry and their network on a daily basis.

And then more importantly, I fundamentally believe that the world needs to have a high-value feed product that they can turn to where it’s not vitriol, it’s not hate speech, it’s valuable content that relates to you and your job and your professional network. So, when we get that product right, the feed product, everything else starts to work well. All of our — when people use LinkedIn more frequently, they’re more likely to keep their profile up-to-date. They’re more likely to subscribe to a premium service. They’re more likely to apply for a job. They’re more likely to click on an ad. So, getting that core quality feed experience right has been a lot of the focus that we use. And then, the value I talked about in some of the job-seeking products or the job coach product is a lot of the focus as well that leads towards just higher usage and retention.

And I mean, I think if you were to compare like the member base size and the usage rates of LinkedIn compared to other networks, you’ll see that people use LinkedIn more frequently because it’s not as exciting to like push the LinkedIn button versus like push the TikTok button sometimes. But our ability to monetize that in a variety of forms is obviously super high. So, the more we can just create a more compelling engagement experience through LinkedIn, all boats rise on top of that.

Unidentified Analyst

Wonderful. Since you mentioned monetization, would love to get some color from you on some of the initiatives to monetize that user base that you described, please.

Ryan Roslansky

48 people will get a job every minute right now through LinkedIn, will start a new job, not apply to a job, literally start a new job. We are running the definitive talent marketplace globally, but we’re only scratching the surface in terms of how many people get a job on a daily basis versus how many of them do it on LinkedIn. So, there’s a lot of opportunity for us to expand. We’ve really focused a lot in our talent marketplace on kind of the core, technology, North America, finance, and that’s been a strength for us. And we’ve spent a lot of time and effort now to expand to other geographies, other industries. The healthcare industry is hiring like crazy right now. Historically, they didn’t use LinkedIn for that. We’ve put a lot of effort into being — LinkedIn be the place where you can help hire into the healthcare industry. So, a lot of our — in our talent marketplace, it’s about expanding beyond the core that we’ve been in for a long time and also making those products much more effective, making a recruiter much more effective. I think that it’s early days, but when you can get some of these AI tools right, it starts to change the ability for what the commercial model looks like inside of some of these spaces that we play. So, I think that’s a big one.

And then secondly, on the advertising side, there is no shortage of dollars for advertisers looking to market on LinkedIn. The key for us is the other side of the equation, which is just to get me to get more people using LinkedIn more frequently and continuing to improve those AI tools through Marketing Solutions to help drive that business as well.

And then, I’m pretty bullish about our online subscription business also where it’s a 15-year-old business. It’s one of the things that Reid Hoffman started as a — to give us optionality when he started the company a long time ago, but we’ve never really cracked the nut on true value that will lead to strong retention. I think that this AI Coach stuff that we’re doing, I think that a lot of the new premium creation features, et cetera, like that’s going to be a real strength for us definitely in terms of the retention of our premium business moving forward. So, I see some good strength across all of those.

And then, the last thing that’s newer for us is we launched a verified identity product on LinkedIn about a year-and-a-half ago, where through LinkedIn, you can verify who you are either by leveraging your passport, partnerships with companies like CLEAR, through your corporate e-mail address, et cetera. You’ll get a little verified check next to you at LinkedIn.

What’s surprising to me is that we built that just to ensure that we can help LinkedIn become a really trusted platform when you’re — you get a message from someone, it’s like, oh, they’re verified. This is really that person, et cetera. What’s been surprising to me is how many companies outside of LinkedIn are asking us, “Hey, how can we use that verified identity concept inside of our products? Do you think that ID — verified identification, trusting who someone is, is going to become more and more important over the next decade, especially in an AI-enabled world?” So, I do think there’s some great opportunities for us to expand into new areas through things like identification moving forward.

Unidentified Analyst

Wonderful. Great. You talked about some share gains that you’re driving in the hiring end market through LinkedIn Talent Solutions. Can you talk about some of the growth initiatives there in that business, please?

Ryan Roslansky

Yeah. I mean, the interesting thing is, I think one of the smartest moves that we made was years ago, getting into the kind of the learning and development space, not just for learning and development, but I think that companies hire, they split on hiring, et cetera. We’ve been able to kind of go in there and say, “Hey, whether you’re hiring new people or looking to upskill or train your existing workforce, like we have the solution for you.” So, I think it’s been a really smart move to help us penetrate the talent space greater.

Then, moving forward, here’s the math that every CHRO and CIO is about to start doing in their company, which is, there’s going to start to be more of an overlap between tools and humans. So, a lot of what’s going to happen through AI, again, if you break down everyone’s job into a set of tasks, it’s like, oh, I can create a more productive workforce by leveraging a variety of these AI tools. So, then the question is, how do you retrain, upskill, and first, make sense of that dynamic for your company? And that’s where a lot of our emphasis right now inside of our talent development products are moving. How do we first help you understand what your workforce looks like? What are the skills that exist inside of your company? Where do we think that’s going to need to go? And then, how do we help you get there through training or internal movement, internal hiring, et cetera? So, a lot of great momentum we have there right now.

Unidentified Analyst

Great. I guess, we’re in a challenging hiring environment. With some of those initiatives described here, do you feel like you can still grow the business with that environment as a backdrop?

Ryan Roslansky

I think, I mean, one of the things that I’ve alluded to before was the leading signal on talent is really members moving around and moving jobs. And I think that that’s come down a lot. Now we’re seeing it start to spike again. So, it may not even be companies adding net new headcount, but attrition rates are starting to climb, so they’re going to need to replace that headcount. So, any time there’s movement in the labor market, LinkedIn is the solution of choice for all these companies.

The talent development side is also where a lot of companies will focus on internal movement and development. And there’s — I think we are also quickly becoming the definitive internal talent movement product through LinkedIn Learning and a lot of our Talent Solutions products. And then, we have barely even scratched the surface on the amount of people who actually end up getting jobs in the world through LinkedIn. I think there’s a lot of opportunity for us to expand our TAM there.

And then, a little bit like I alluded to before, I do think there’s going to be an evolution in commercial models, which is if we can create these AI recruiting tools to be as productive as I know they can be, the decision moving forward maybe is if you’re a CHRO, hey, maybe I used to say I needed to add another 50 additional recruiters every year to my company. And the productivity through LinkedIn’s recruiter tool is so great that maybe next year, I’ll only need to add 40 people to my recruiting team. And then, when that math starts to happen, it opens up the equation for us to start to evolve the commercial model of how we charge for these products and what they look like. So, I think there’s a lot of excitement for me in the talent space.

Unidentified Analyst

Wonderful. And why don’t we just shift to key growth drivers in the Marketing Solutions business, your digital B2B advertising?

Ryan Roslansky

More people using LinkedIn more frequently, better AI, campaign creation and targeting and a better ability to develop and maintain ROI, so ROI reporting tool is really important. B2B is a really different world than B2C. B2B sales cycles are typically nine months. So, you may have seen an ad on LinkedIn and then us connecting the dots through Sales Navigator or usage to someone actually buying the product is a lot of the stuff that we’re working on to ensure people understand how valuable the ROI is on LinkedIn.

Unidentified Analyst

Wonderful. And when you think about differentiators for LinkedIn in that end market, what would you say those are in the advertising?

Ryan Roslansky

The ability to target a B2B audience in a trusted space and a trusted environment kind of through the LinkedIn feed are really the two biggest differentiators that we have. The more and more that we’re pushing into video being the medium of choice on LinkedIn, I think a lot of folks are going to be able to move B2B dollars into video advertising, which hasn’t really happened a lot yet. So, we’re focused a lot on that also.

Unidentified Analyst

Wonderful. Well, Ryan, we’re out of time. Great having you here. Thanks so much for joining us.

Ryan Roslansky

Thank you. Appreciate it. Thanks.