Whether AI will replace existing jobs by automating the functions of human employees, or somehow lead to new jobs in the future, is debated to death. Regardless, the AI buildout and rollout is now underway. And in an ocean of AI pessimism, Nvidia‘s CEO Jensen Huang is relatively bullish on the future of human labour.
“The number of engineers, software engineers, is increasing. People talk about AI reducing jobs — complete nonsense. It’s causing more software engineers to be hired and the reason for that is very simple. If you can hire a software engineer and you can generate $9 trillion with productive work, why wouldn’t you want to hire more software engineers?”
Software development in the age of AI
Speaking at GTC 2026, the Nvidia chief attempted to bulldoze over pessimistic views that AI will lead to job losses by arguing that productive companies keen to grow will wield AI as a productivity tool.
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By doing so, he suggested, companies can become more productive rather than scale back on staff like engineers altogether. Tech like agentic AI, similarly, may need massive teams of people to manage, configure and operate.
Huang isn’t alone in this view, with Gartner even suggesting that after the temporary disruption caused by the AI rollout, the technology will be responsible for the creation of more jobs in the future.
The white-collar cull
This thinking defies much of the received wisdom that has arisen about AI’s impact on the labor market – and really stems from parallels drawn with the industrial revolution in the 1800s, when critics – known as the Luddites – levied the same charges against the emerging technologies of the time.
Despite Huang’s optimism, the cold, hard reality in the labor market of today – rather than some hypothetical idealistic scenario in the future – is that AI is being cited as the main factor behind job losses, redundancies and restructures.
In 2025, for example, while there was an uptick in the number of vacancies for senior or specialized engineers, entry-level and junior roles were decimated, with Crunchbase tracking the number of roles that disappeared.
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