- Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang sees AI as the driving force of a new industrial revolution
- Huang believes AI tokens, which represent valuable digital output, will pave the way for innovations like robotic articulation
- Nvidia is embedding AI across its operations, and he encouraged other enteprise leaders to do the same
GARTNER IT SYMPOSIUM/XPO, ORLANDO, FL — Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang believes we are witnessing the dawn of a new industrial revolution—one powered not by steam or electricity, but by artificial intelligence (AI).
Speaking at the Gartner IT Symposium, Huang reflected on where AI will go next and how enterprise leaders should be thinking about implementing the technology.
The shift from coding traditional software to AI-powered neural networks has "reinvented the whole stack,” he said. And this transformation is not just about more powerful computing, but about redefining the very nature of work.
"AI learns not tools, but work," Huang said. Unlike software tools designed for human use, AI can acquire skills, reason through complex problems and even collaborate with other AI systems to perform tasks autonomously.
For Huang, this marks a monumental shift across enterprises. Historically focused on building tools—both hardware and software—the world is now seeing digital versions of intelligence.
“We have this new industry on top of us that never existed before,” he said. “This is the beginning of a new industrial revolution.”
The power of tokenization
In its early days, the concept of software as a product—abstract, yet highly valuable—was a revelation. Huang sees AI following a similar trajectory, only this time it is not software but "tokens"—the building blocks of AI—that are being produced.
These tokens, generated by AI, represent a new form of output. “We are producing a whole bunch of digital versions of something very valuable we call intelligence,” he explained. Tokens can be reconstituted into language, video or images. Soon, he argued the world might even see tokenized robotic articulation, where robots can be told in natural language to perform tasks and behave in specific ways.
“The technology must be extremely close for us to have artificial general robotics, we must be extremely close,” he said. “I think that realization of the meaning of technology and what is possible, the art of the possible, by connecting dots really empowers you.”
Where to begin?
The AI revolution upon us is “profound,” Huang said, but many enterprise leaders are still left wondering where it can and should manifest within their organizations.
Nvidia is developing what Huang calls the “AI brain,” the fundamental technology powering AI. But as an enterprise itself, the company is also embedding AI across its operations — something he said every company should be doing now.
AI is being used to optimize Nvidia’s critical processes like chip design and supply chain management. Similarly, enterprise leaders should focus on integrating AI into all of their platforms and databases. The benefit of putting AI in the loop is it captures institutional knowledge, Huang said, and “that institutional knowledge will never leave the company.”
The next big thing to come is agentic AI, models that are capable of making decisions with little human intervention. Nvidia has been working with SAP, ServiceNow and others to put such agents into their systems.
“If you can get AI to learn in an unsupervised way, then the human labeling obstacle bottleneck is eliminated, and we can use large computers to go learn new things and have large computers go do amazing new things,” Huang said.
Nvidia will one day have 50,000 employees and over 100 million AI assistants, Huang predicted. And he said every organization will be see a similar growth in AI workers.
“There's no question about it,” he said. “Whether it happens in your generation or it happens in the next generation. It will happen.”