As AI-powered outreach explodes, the value of genuine, deliberate LinkedIn networking has only increased.
Something has changed about the LinkedIn DM. If you spend any time on the platform, you have probably felt it: the messages that arrive with suspicious precision, perfectly referencing your job title and recent post, yet somehow feeling like nobody actually wrote them. The timing is right, the personalization is surface-level, and the human being is somewhere else entirely.
More than 50 percent of businesses now use an AI assistant to build connection request messages within the first month of creating LinkedIn outreach campaigns. The LinkedIn automation tools market has reached an estimated $850 million annually in 2026, growing 42 percent year over year. The result is a platform where the volume of outreach has exploded, and the signal value of any individual message has collapsed. Everyone is “connecting,” but are they truly connecting?
Alexander Smith has watched this play out from multiple sides. He built his career at Facebook, Google, and the Obama White House. He grew a 68,000-person audience on LinkedIn by posting career advice so consistently and specifically that recruiters started reaching out to him rather than the other way around. And he is now writing a book about networking — one he could not have written three years ago, because the environment has changed that dramatically.
“People are flooding DMs with networking messages,” he says, “and now we have AI tools automating those messages. What does it look like to build real relationships right now?”
His answer starts with understanding what automated outreach actually costs the people sending it.
The spray and pray problem
When Smith was at Facebook and Google, he received an overwhelming number of LinkedIn messages from people trying to break into tech. Most of them had one thing in common: they were sent to the wrong person.
“I was in trust and safety and policy work,” he says. “I got messages from software engineers, data analysts. There was one person who sent me a message asking about specific coding languages. I had to say, I don’t know what that means. That’s not my role.”
The instinct behind those messages is understandable. You see someone at a company you want to work for, and you reach out. But the strategy to reach out to anyone at the company and hope for the best is precisely the one that AI has made both easier to execute and easier to ignore. More than 11,000 job applications are submitted on LinkedIn every minute. Recruiters and hiring managers are receiving more outreach than at any point in the platform’s history. The messages that get ignored fastest are the ones that feel like they could have been sent to anyone.
“I really encourage people to take four or five minutes, read someone’s LinkedIn profile, and see if they’re relevant to your career path,” Smith says. “Are they relevant to your field? Do they have similar experiences? That extra step of trying to find people who are relevant is really helpful versus a spray-and-pray approach where you’re just reaching out to someone because they work at Netflix or Nike.”
Professionals who focus on fostering a smaller number of high-value connections consistently outperform those still using spray-and-pray tactics. The idea is not to send fewer messages, but more about sending the right ones to the right people, with the right context, at the right moment.
Why human networking has never mattered more
The counterintuitive implication of AI-automated outreach is that genuine human connection has become a scarce resource precisely because automation has made it so easy to fake.
AI has made it effortless to send hundreds of personalized-looking messages without writing a single one. The result is a platform flooded with outreach that feels human on the surface and hollow underneath. Recruiters and hiring managers have become extraordinarily good at spotting it and also quick at ignoring it. Which means the actual competitive advantage right now belongs to the person who does the opposite. More deliberate messaging is the key to standing out in a sea of automated connection requests. A message that is clearly written by a real person who has done their homework and actually gives a reason to respond is so uncommon, it’s a pleasant surprise to those who receive it.
Smith experienced this directly as he was building his own presence on LinkedIn. “There were recruiters reaching out to me from different companies,” he says. “When I was networking or reaching out to people, they would recognize me from my content. That’s when I started to realize that your personal brand is more important than the company you’re working at.”
That statement lands differently coming from someone who has worked at Facebook and Google. The implication is not that prestigious employers do not matter. It is the network you build, the reputation, the relationships, the presence that precedes you that travels in ways that a company name on a resume does not. The company can disappear. The job can be eliminated. The personal brand stays.
The human touch still closes the deal. AI is already saving hours and lifting reply rates, but through 2026, human connection remains decisive at the point of conversion. What that means practically is that AI can help you find the right people to reach out to, draft a starting point for a message, or analyse which connections are worth prioritizing. What it cannot do is replace the moment when someone recognizes your name, remembers your content, and decides they want to talk to you.
The investment frame
Smith has a way of thinking about networking that changes the entire practice, from something you do when you need something to something you build before you ever do.
“I really view LinkedIn as investing,” he says. “If you consistently put time into building your profile, posting, talking to people, it is a social media platform, and if you start creating content, pay attention to the people who are commenting and engaging. If you do those extra steps, you’re going to see it pay off.”
The investment frame matters because it changes the time horizon. Most people approach networking as something you do when you need something like when you are job searching, when you are trying to close a deal, when you are trying to get into a room you have not been invited to. That approach is the equivalent of trying to open a bank account and immediately withdraw from it.
What Smith is describing instead is the slow accumulation of deposits, a message checked in on, a comment responded to, a connection made with a former colleague, that compounds quietly until the moment you actually need it. “It’s not just how do you network quickly when you urgently need a job,” he says. “How do you build something that is really sustainable and you can really grow from long term?”
LinkedIn generates 80 percent of all B2B leads from social media, surpassing Facebook, X, and Instagram combined. The platform is where professional decisions are being made, researched, and influenced at a scale that has no precedent. The people who have been building there consistently, not automating, not spraying, not praying, are the ones with the accounts that have been compounding the longest.
The blooper reel nobody shows
One of the reasons most people’s networking feels transactional is that they only show up in public when they have something to announce. The new job. The promotion. The speaking gig. The wins.
Smith argues this is a missed opportunity, and not just strategically.
“LinkedIn shows you the final product,” he says, “but you’re not seeing the bloopers. You’re not seeing the roadblocks that went into things.” He has made a deliberate practice of sharing the roadblocks, the hundreds of unanswered networking messages, the opportunities that did not work out, the finalist positions he did not get. Even the time he got rejected from a volunteer mentor program.
“I got somebody who reached out and said, I also got rejected for that too,” he says. “It was just funny. And I think it really breaks the ice when you can just not take yourself too seriously and tell people about your journey and all the things that go on behind the scenes.”
The professional case for sharing failure is not sentimental. It is strategic. When someone sees you navigate rejection with transparency and humour, they learn something about how you operate under pressure that a polished announcement never reveals. The connection that forms around a blooper is more durable than the one formed around a highlight, because the blooper is where the real person shows up.
What good networking actually looks like
For job seekers specifically, Smith’s advice runs counter to the dominant narrative. The viral LinkedIn post that says “shoot your shot” is aspirational and largely useless. The realistic version is harder to hear.
“I truly think the bar to match the job description with your experience, depending on the company, is at least 80 percent, but sometimes it’s 100 percent,” he says. “Think about the recruiter and think about the competition. What did they look like? What’s their background? And do you feel like you have the skills and experience where you can match up with those people?”
The networking that actually moves applications forward is not the cold message to a random employee at a company you want to work for. It is the relationship built over time with the people who would actually be your future colleagues. The ones who know if the team is expanding, who understand what specific experience would be helpful to highlight, and who can tell you whether the culture is genuinely a fit.
“Those future co-workers, future teammates, are the people that are going to know if the team’s hiring,” he says. “They’re going to know what specific experiences might be helpful to highlight. They’re going to be the people that are relevant to help you assess if you like the company.”
In the Visibility Economy, that is what networking has always been at its best, not a transaction, not a numbers game, not something you automate. It is a sustained investment in relationships with people who matter to where you are going. The people who understand that, and who have been building those relationships before they needed them, are the ones who are finding that the job market, as brutal as it is, still has a place for them.
AI can send the message. It cannot build the relationship. That part is still yours.
The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.
Feature image credit: Getty Images
