Nvidia Wants to Turn Employees into 'AI Foremen'
Nvidia Wants to Turn Employees into ‘AI Foremen’
Jakarta, CNBC Indonesia — Technology companies in Silicon Valley are now offering new incentives to engineers beyond high salaries, namely artificial intelligence (AI) tokens. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang revealed the idea of providing AI token budgets as additional compensation to boost employee productivity.
According to CNBC, Huang explained that AI tokens, which are data units for running systems and automation tools, can be used by engineers to operate AI agents in completing work. He described this scheme as becoming one of Silicon Valley’s new recruitment tools, with the value of tokens potentially reaching half of an engineer’s base salary.
According to Huang, in the future, engineers will work with the assistance of hundreds of thousands of AI agents capable of independently completing complex tasks. He even stated that Nvidia, which has around 42,000 human employees, will eventually be accompanied by hundreds of thousands of “digital employees”.
This idea emerges amid growing concerns about AI’s impact on the job market, particularly white-collar jobs. Oaktree Capital Management founder Howard Marks assessed that AI’s current ability to act autonomously is the key differentiator that could potentially replace human labour.
A Goldman Sachs report estimates that AI could automate around 25% of work hours in the United States and increase productivity by up to 15%. However, this could also lead to 6% to 7% of jobs being displaced during the technology adoption period.
Goldman Sachs senior economist Joseph Briggs stated that the risk of labour displacement could be greater if AI proves more disruptive than previous technologies. Nevertheless, he emphasised that technological changes will also create new types of jobs in the future.
Huang, however, views the development of AI agents as a driver of software demand, not the opposite. He assessed that the more AI agents are used, the greater the need for infrastructure, programmes, and computing resources will increase rapidly.
CI&T technology company president Bruno Guicardi described this change as a paradigm shift in the software industry. He said that engineers can now give instructions to computers using everyday language, so work that previously took months can be completed in just days.
Nevertheless, the labour market faces a “talent paradox” where companies want to reduce the number of employees while struggling to find workers with AI skills. Mercer consultant Lewis Garrad stated that around 98% of executives expect AI to reduce the workforce in the next two years, while 54% still face talent shortages.
Entry-level roles are considered the most vulnerable to replacement because many basic tasks can now be automated by AI. Intelligence Briefing founder Andreas Welsch added that jobs such as data analysis, document processing, and initial report compilation are the most at risk of being affected.
However, integrating AI into company operations is not easy, with around 80% to 85% of AI projects since 2018 reported to have failed. Welsch warned that massive use of AI agents could instead create more problems if not implemented properly.