AI can make networking more efficient by improving outreach, follow-up, and discovery, helping you stay in touch and spot the right opportunities faster.
AI has the power to automate many of our daily tasks, personal and professional. Networking is one of them. AI-enabled networking, when done right, can be very powerful, but when done wrong, it can undermine the relationship-building process.
For this article, we can think of four phases in the networking relationship: initial meeting, relationship-building, staying in touch, and being top of mind. We’ll explore how AI can impact each of them, for better or worse.
I’m not a fan of cold outreach to strangers, but many people are. AI can obviously automate that outreach. Used well, it can scale your efforts by writing meaningful messages communicating value and sparking interest. Misused, it’s spam on steroids. Most of the inbound messages I get today are AI spam (e.g., “I’m really impressed by your work doing <thing one from my LinkedIn profile>, <thing two not actually on my LinkedIn profile>, and <thing three from a job on my LinkedIn profile from over ten years ago>”). When doing outreach, AI may be able to help you write it and personalize it, but I would ultimately personally review and finalize each message instead of batch-sending it.
Where I think AI is more valuable is “targeting.” Let me be clear, I’m not suggesting you use it to figure out how to stalk someone. However, it can help you find events where you’re likely to run into the kind of people you want to meet. Likewise, if you need to find someone specifically, AI can more efficiently search your network (which includes your network’s connections) to find the right person, even if the outreach itself remains personal.
Relationship-building is the essence of networking. This cannot be outsourced to AI. It can help remind you whom you haven’t seen in a while or help you schedule a time to get together, but the relationship-building itself must be deeply human. While part of it can include brief emails or text messages, and not just in-person interactions, outsourcing this hollows out the relationship.
If you need help building relationships, certainly you can use AI for feedback and advice (this can be helpful for neurodivergent people, for example), but it’s a coach, not a puppeteer. You must take real ownership of the communication and, more importantly, of the relationship itself.
While relationship-building is the core of the interaction, some things don’t have to be as personal. A family holiday card, for example, is written once, and sent to everyone on your holiday card list. It’s not personalized, but it does help you stay in touch. Small things like that can be automated. Obviously AI can help write your holiday update or a new job announcement. Likewise, it can be useful to automate a “How are you?” email, but only if the follow-up to their response is from you, and not your AI, because at that point it becomes relationship-building.
It can be especially useful to keep track of your network. Again, not stalking, but agents can be used to see who changed jobs, had a baby, or has some type of announcement. In other words, AI can filter your feed and find the high-signal posts (e.g., “I’m changing jobs”) among all the noise (e.g., “look what I ate for dinner” pictures) that clog up a feed.
I encourage people to be active with their relationships because out of touch means out of mind. This isn’t a criticism of people; we’re all busy and it’s hard to remember someone who mentioned a month ago that he’s looking for a job. AI agents can help keep track of who is looking for what (e.g., jobs, vendors, partners, advice). This can tie into tracking social media posts to identify people saying, “I’m looking for a new job,” and connect them with people posting, “I’m hiring.” As humans we try, but it’s a lot of details to keep in mind. AI is much better at that type of tracking. I can imagine a future where we hand off such requests to AI agents who can track them and actively keep an eye out on our behalf (or on behalf of others in our network).
This last activity raises the question of what makes a network valuable in the first place. AI has the power to automate away a number of tasks, including some involved in networking. Most of us will welcome the saved effort for mundane or repetitive tasks. But what if we automate the human side of networking?
Consider that people enjoy scrolling through social media videos, such as pets doing silly things or humans executing impressive stunts. We can use AI to create even more incredible videos, but some of the appeal fades, since we know it’s not real (this is different from a movie with special effects where we have no expectation of it being real). Likewise, if we lose the human element of networking, will we lose the inherent value it brings?
If we automate away relationship-building and judgment, does it change the value of the network itself? We’ll explore this in “Automating Networking with AI – What AI Can’t Replace.”
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