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Jensen Huang, CEO of technology behemoth Nvidia has doubled down on a prediction that in the future we will all be working alongside AI employees.
Speaking on the “No Priors” podcast, Huang asserted there is “no question” that the future of work is one where employees will interact with AI agents as though they were colleagues.
The executive predicted that AI employees will work across areas including marketing and supply chain roles and will be able to complete work just as people do—i.e. an AI ‘employee’ will be given a task alongside the context needed to complete it, and a back-and-forth dialogue will take place as more information is required or to give updates on progress.
"There's no question we're gonna have AI employees of all kinds,” he said.
While the CEO spoke of this future in excited tones – understandably so, given Nvidia’s position as a leading manufacturer of graphics processing units (GPUs) and AI chips has seen its market value surge to $3.65trillion – not everyone is ready or willing to accept a future of AI employees so readily.
Employees – and HR professionals – wary of AI employees
Many are worried about the impact that businesses introducing AI employees, whether or not they are a replacement for human counterparts.
Earlier in 2024, for example, a Harvard Business Review study found that working with AI could make employees lonelier and less healthy. The study, authored by researchers David De Cremer and Joel Koopman, identified that while AI can deliver major productivity gains for organizations, this may be at the expense of workplace relationships and social connections.
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166 engineers at a biomedical company who had worked with the company for an average of three years and with AI systems for two years were monitored in the study. Those who worked with AI reported “greater feelings of loneliness,” with knock-on effects including greater alcohol consumption and insomnia.
More broadly, workers have reported concerns about how AI will change their work. A 2023 CNBC SurveyMonkey Workforce survey found 60% of employees who use AI regularly reported they worry about its impact on their jobs.
But warning signs about the prospect of engaging with AI agents instead of employees are not just coming from workers who use the technology day in, day out. HR professionals and experts have similarly noted concerns about the potential impact on employee wellbeing and how human beings are framed in the conversation about AI, productivity, and optimization.
In July, HR tech company Lattice said it made “AI history” by becoming the first platform to give digital workers official employee records – with capabilities to bring AI employees through onboarding, goal setting, feedback – before scrapping the plan after backlash from HR and tech professionals.
“Treating AI agents as employees disrespects the humanity of your real employees… Worse, it implies that you view humans simply as "resources" to be optimized and measured against machines,” wrote Sawyer Middeleer, Chief of Staff at Aomni, in response to a LinkedIn post from the company’s CEO about the move.
Sarah Franklin, CEO of Lattice, initially said stated that the “AI workforce is here,” meaning employers “need to fully understand what it looks like to integrate AI employees into the workforce to make sure we create transparent, responsible practices around hiring AI.”
But after the backlash, the company indefinitely scrapped the product. “This innovation sparked a lot of conversation and questions that have no clear answers yet,” Franklin told Fortune. In the same month, Nvidia’s CEO claimed that AI-powered “digital agents” would “augment every single job in the company.”
It’s not difficult to see threre is a gulf of disconnect between where technology CEOs feel the future of workplaces lies, and the current comfort levels of HR professionals and employees.
More questions than answers – are AI predictions helpful?
In another podcast last week, Huang similarly spoke about a future where AI employees could even recruit other AI employees to help complete tasks and create communications channels to interact with employees (both human and digital).
The CEO argues it will lead to more productivity and growth for the business, something that he says is unlikely to lead to layoffs.
With so much promise – new efficiencies to uncover, cost-savings to identify, time-saving automations to explore – it’s easy to see why tech CEOs who live in the world of AI are excited to talk about and test what it could mean for the way people do their work.
But even if not always through layoffs, AI is leading companies to downsize teams and to replace the work that many people are proud to call their career. Google CEO Sundar Pichai, for example, confirmed recently that AI now produces 25% of the company’s code, and AWS CEO Matt Garman warned developers that in two years’ time they would likely no longer be coding.
Talking from an echo chamber of AI, communications from tech professionals and business leaders are frequently laced with corporate buzzwords and fall well wide of the mark with the current feelings of employees. Bold claims are made about the future of work without consideration of how employees are feeling today.
HR professionals must partner with fellow business leaders through how AI adoption, including the prospective introduction of AI employees, will shape everything from job security to employee wellbeing.
Bringing all employee perspectives to the table – excitement, fear, and queries alike – will do far more to prepare businesses for the benefits of AI adoption than surface-level predictions about the technology’s impact.
