Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang delivers the keynote address at the GTC AI conference in San Jose, California on March 18, 2025.
Josh Adelson | AFP | getty images
The benefits of working in Silicon Valley have long included high salaries. Now, some engineers may be offered a new incentive: artificial intelligence tokens.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang introduced a new compensation model on Monday Give indicative budget to engineers Effectively paying them to deploy AI agents as a productivity multiplier, on top of their basic salary.
Tokens, or units of data used by AI systems, can be spent to run tools and automate tasks and are becoming “one of the hottest recruiting tools in Silicon Valley,” Huang said.
“(Engineers) are going to make a few hundred thousand dollars a year, their base salary,” Huang said at the chipmaker’s annual GPU technology conference.
“I’m going to give them maybe half of that in tokens on top of (their base salary)… because every engineer who has access to tokens will be more productive.”
The pitch hinted at Huang’s broader view of the workplace, in which engineers oversee a fleet of AI agents capable of autonomously completing complex, multi-step tasks with minimal user input.
This is a viewpoint that Huang has been developing publicly. Last month, he told CNBC that Nvidia employees will one day work with hundreds of thousands of AI agents.
“I have 42,000 organic employees and I’ll have hundreds of thousands of digital employees,” he said.
The comments come as concerns grow that AI agents – software systems capable of independently executing complex, multi-step tasks – will hollow out white-collar work.
one in memorandum To investors, Howard Marks, founder of Oaktree Capital Management, warned of “an incredible leap in the capabilities of AI”, which now allows it to “act autonomously” – a specific point that determines its ability to replace human labor.
“This difference is what separates a $50 billion market from a multi-trillion dollar market,” the veteran investor said.
Goldman Sachs estimates that AI could potentially automate 25% of all working hours in the US, enough to fuel fears of a “job apocalypse” by some.
The bank estimates a 15% productivity increase from AI, which could displace 6% to 7% of jobs over the adoption period.
“The risks are tilted toward greater displacement if AI proves to be more labor-displacing than prior technologies,” said Joseph Briggs, senior global economist at Goldman.
About 60% of today’s workforce is employed in occupations that did not exist in 1940, Briggs said, citing a study by economist David Autor that found AI will make some roles obsolete while creating others that don’t yet exist.
AI agents drive demand for software
Huang takes an optimistic view of the impact of AI agents on the software industry and describes it as “Counter-intuitive.” Instead of reducing demand for software, AI agents will become its most demanding customers.
Their logic is this: More AI agents means greater demand for the underlying software infrastructure they run on – the programs, tools, and computing resources that power them.
“The number of C-compilers we use, the number of Python programs we have, the number of examples, is growing very rapidly — because the number of agents we have using these tools is growing,” he said.
Bruno Guicciardi, president and founder of information technology company CI&T, described this change as nothing less than a paradigm shift. “A new layer of abstraction is being created through agents,” he said.
“Now software engineers can ‘tell’ a computer what to do, not in some programming language but in plain English. What used to take months to do now takes days. And we only see acceleration from here.”
‘talent paradox’
AI-induced concern over labor displacement has become harder to control, even as companies struggle to find skilled workers.
The job market is currently experiencing a “talent paradox,” where 98% of C-suite executives expect AI to lead to headcount reductions in the next two years, while 54% cited talent shortages as their top macro challenge, said Lewis Garrad, career practice leader at consultancy Mercer Asia.
Garrad estimates that about 65% of executives expect 11% to 30% of their workforce to be redeployed or reskilled due to AI by 2026.
Entry-level jobs are at greatest risk as AI eliminates “stepping-stone” tasks historically used to train new workers, further widening the skills gap at a time when demand for AI-literate workers is accelerating, Garradt said.
Andreas Welsh, founder of consultancy Intelligence Briefing and author of The Human Agent AI Age, said roles involving data analysis, document processing, information comparison and drafting preliminary reports are at risk of being “first in line” for displacement.
Goldman Briggs also acknowledged that even under the most optimistic scenario the transition will not be frictionless, estimating that a peak gross unemployment rate would rise by about half a percentage point as the job market transitions to a new era.
But new jobs will emerge, Briggs said, emphasizing that technological change has always been the main driver of job growth in the long run through the creation of new businesses.
Millions of people are now employed in fields like computing, the gig economy, e-commerce, content creation, and video games – industries that were science fiction a generation ago.
That said, integrating AI capabilities into existing corporate workflows may ultimately prove to be harder than the technology itself. Intelligence Briefing’s Welsh said that about 80% to 85% of AI projects have failed since 2018 — a sobering statistic for an industry awash in enthusiasm.
“It would be undesirable to have hundreds of thousands of agents that create more problems than they solve,” he said.
