Nvidia’s Huang pitches AI tokens on top of salary as agents reshape how

The perks 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 on Monday floated a novel compensation model that would give engineers a token budget on top of their base salary, effectively paying them to deploy AI agents as productivity multipliers.

Tokens, or units of data used by AI systems, can be spent to run tools and automate tasks and are becoming “one of the recruiting tools in Silicon Valley,” Huang said.

“[Engineers] are going to make a few hundred thousand dollars a year, their base pay,” Huang said at the chipmaker’s annual GPU Technology Conference.

“I’m going to give them probably half of that on top of [their base pay] as tokens … because every engineer that has access to tokens will be more productive.”

The pitch signaled Huang’s broader vision of the workplace, in which engineers oversee a fleet of AI agents capable of completing complex, multi-step tasks autonomously with minimal user input.

It is a vision that Huang has been building toward publicly. Last month, he told CNBC that Nvidia‘s employees would one day work alongside hundreds of thousands of AI agents.

“I have 42,000 biological employees, and I’m going to 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.

In a memo to investors, Howard Marks, founder of Oaktree Capital Management, warned of “an incredible leap ahead in AI’s capabilities” that now allows it to “act autonomously” — a distinguishing point that determines its ability to substitute human labor.

“That difference is what separates a $50 billion market from a multi trillion dollar one,” the veteran investor said.

Goldman Sachs estimates AI could potentially automate tasks accounting for 25% of all work hours in the U.S., enough to fuel fears of what some have grimly dubbed a “job apocalypse.”

The bank sees a 15% productivity boost from AI, which could lead to 6% to 7% of jobs displaced over the adoption period.

“Risks are skewed toward greater displacement if AI proves more labor-displacing than prior technologies,” said Joseph Briggs, Goldman’s senior global economist.

Some 60% of today’s workers are employed in occupations that didn’t exist in 1940, Briggs said, citing a study by economist David Autor, suggesting that AI will render some roles obsolete while creating others that don’t yet exist.

Huang has taken an optimistic view of the impact of AI agents on the software industry, describing it as “counterintuitive.” Rather than reducing demand for software, AI agents will become its most voracious customers.

His logic…