Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Predicts AI Tokens Will Become a Standard Job Perk

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s suggestion earlier this week that his company may pay engineers artificial intelligence (AI) tokens in addition to their base salary, is the latest example of his vision in which AI agents will play a key role in the workplace, CNBC reported Friday (March 20).

Huang said Monday (March 16) during his keynote address at the Nvidia GTC AI Conference & Expo that tokens are becoming a recruiting tool in Silicon Valley, according to the report. Tokens are units of data used by AI systems, the report said.

“I could totally imagine in the future every single engineer in our company will need an annual token budget,” Huang said during his keynote. “They’re going to make a few hundred thousand dollars a year, their base pay, I’m going to give them probably half of that on top of it as tokens so that they could be amplified 10x. Of course we would. It is now one of the recruiting tools in Silicon Valley — ‘How many tokens comes along with my job?’”

Huang told CNBC in February that a growing number of AI agents will work alongside Nvidia employees.

“I have 42,000 biological employees, and I’m going to have hundreds of thousands of digital employees,” he said, per the report.

Huang also told CNBC in February that AI agents will have a beneficial impact on the software industry. Rather than reducing demand for the industry’s products, AI agents will become its customers as they use programs, tools and computing resources, he said.

“The number of C-compilers that we use, the number of Python programs that we have, the number of instances, are growing very, very fast — because the number of agents we have that use these tools are going up,” Huang said, per the report.

PYMNTS reported Thursday (March 19) that Huang said during his keynote address that companies will shift from software that enables employees to do work, to software that does the work itself, autonomously, through AI agents executing tasks without continuous human input.

Nvidia said in reports released earlier this month that AI is delivering measurable financial gains for businesses. Eighty-eight percent of organizations say AI has increased their annual revenue, and 87% say it has reduced their costs. In terms of AI adoption, 64% of companies are actively using AI, while 28% are evaluating potential deployments.