Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was bullish in his predictions of whether AI would lead to the demise of product designers and engineers, stating that he believes a new age of AI agents to aid designers and implicitly trained robotics to assist the majority of SME manufacturers will supercharge the industry.
Speaking at 3DExperience World in Houston, USA, alongside Dassault Systèmes CEO Pascal Daloz, he tackled the fear of new intelligent AI companions and software reducing the need for humans in the profession.
“If AI were to replace jobs, the number of engineers, the number of software programmers, the number of designers will reduce. If the number of engineers and designers will be reduced, the amount of software they use is going to reduce. It’s exactly the opposite,” said Huang.
“What’s gonna happen is this: Every engineer will have companions and the systems announced yesterday. These agentic companions that help designers. And so every designer, every software engineer, every creator, will have companions that help them.
“The more AI companions you have, the more virtual seats you will have. These companions are gonna use Solidworks. These companions are gonna use Catia. They’re gonna use Simulia. So, the number of agents, AI designers, AI engineers, are going to grow exponentially. The amount of tool use is going to grow exponentially. They don’t have to have seats, you know? Engineers need to have seats, and our seats are gonna be fine. We’re gonna need them.
“The number of virtual engineers is gonna skyrocket. therefore number the tour is actually has sky. The number of web browsers is gonna skyrocket because AI agents are gonna use them. The number Excel instances is gonna skyrocket because AI agents are going to use Excel.”
Jensen Huang revealed that inside Nvidia, the number of tools being used is skyrocketing because its AIs are using them. ”And so, I’m excited for Pascal [Daloz, CEO Dassault Systèmes]. It is an industry [that will] skyrocket.
“For every engineer that uses the system tools, they’ll probably be 100 AI agents that also use the tools. That’s good news.”
While this sounded more positive for the software creators than the human users, Huang returned to the designers position, saying: “Powered by AI, augmented by AI, your capabilities are lifted. And so one of the things that’s really fantastic about the companion products that Dassault Systèmes created, is that almost any engineer can now have the superpowers of Solidworks. Almost any engineer can have the superpowers of Catia, because you have a companion to help you interpret ‘what are your intentions?’.”
“This gap of connecting human intention, we all have intentions and we all have aspirations, we all have goals in creativity and dreams. We can now translate our intention across that explicit programming gap programme.”
