How Nvidia’s CEO got me excited about our ‘agentic AI’ future

“The era we’re in now is called the era of reasoning AI which is going to be the foundation layer of the next era of AI, or agentic AI.”

This was a statement from Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang at HP’s Amplify Conference in Nashville, last week. And in reflecting on it, it struck me as poignant for the following reason: Up until now I’ve viewed AI on a single timeline starting at the point where I first saw simple AI tools pop up, to now, where they are a lot more complex and capable than they used to be.

In doing so, I’ve failed to see the true potential of AI — the fact that we’re about to enter a whole new age of AI that will make even those smart generative AI tools we have today pale in comparison to what we’ll soon have on our PCs and other connected devices.

Bunny-hop advancements have masked the bigger picture

It’s not that I haven’t been impressed with the advancements I’ve seen in AI tools so far. It’s just that I’ve been mostly fixated on those small advancements in lieu of the broader picture.

I’ve seen new AI art generators like DALL-E and Photoshop AI spring up and I’ve seen bunny-hop updates to AI chatbots like ChatGPT drop, each iteration getting a little smarter and a little more capable.

HP’s own AI Companion on its consumer and commercial PCs, too, gets several of these updates later this year and these are all important steps forward for generative AI. It’s just that I’ve been too focused on these small advancements.

Sometimes it takes a visionary to show you where you’re headed, to reveal the unimaginable bigger picture that you’re bounding towards. Big tech companies are quite good at doing that.

Yep, you can mostly always count on the likes of Intel, AMD – or in this case Nvidia – when you need an eagle-eyed view of the direction of global technology. These companies’ leaders have a commercial imperative to know where we’re headed, to be ahead of the trends, to create the technology we need, and to innovate.

There’s little margin for error, so when Huang spoke about a new AI age at HP Amplify, I was all ears.

In this case Huang’s statement revealed a tantalizing glimpse of a future where AI isn’t just a conglomeration of more of the same passive AI apps we’ve seen before, getting a little bit smarter as months go by. But rather a future where AI tools will be actively involved in shaping our work, play, and even the mundane chores we have to do, whether we ask them to or not.

To say that it’s been a light bulb moment for me is an understatement… So, what is an agentic AI age going to be like?

The real value of agentic AI: Autonomy

No vision of a future run by agentic AI is possible without first understanding what agentic AI is all about. AI agents have unique attributes that together help distinguish them from the passive AI reasoning tools I just mentioned – and which I scarcely use because they are just so time consuming:

Firstly, the most advanced are goal orientated and are involved in adaptive planning. Furthermore, they provide us with tools to direct them when we need to, but they also have a certain level of continuity of execution – in other words, they are constantly running in the background, always active.

We’ve seen AI agents appear in the workplace already, like X.ai’s virtual scheduling assistant or Zapier that automates workflows, and it’s here that they’ll prove their value first and foremost.

In his address to guests at HP Amplify, Huang talked about how Nvidia uses an AI agent to traverse Nvidia’s massive and complex bugs database, in which the AI agent acts to explain the nature of a bug, the likely sources, the systems and people it affects, and even to suggest who should be assigned to fix it.

But it’s when these tools start to trickle down to us at home in large numbers, that the fun starts. These AI agents will help us with just about every aspect of our lives, but do it with greater efficiency and personalization than we previously thought possible. And they’ll be able to run locally off AI powered laptops like the ones HP was showing at its Amplify Conference, instead of needing the cloud.

Adobe

They’ll help us with shopping by finding us the best deals, providing recommendations, and curating our shopping experience; with our finances, i.e. with budgeting, paying bills, advising us about our money and investing; even with travel planning — perhaps suggesting the best itineraries or modes of transport — the list goes on and on.

But the key distinguishing point for me, the one that really gets me excited about agentic AI is this: It’s the fact that the most advanced programs won’t just sit in the background of our devices waiting for us to open an app and ask a question or push a button to make things happen.

No, they’ll act with a level of autonomy and perform tasks without prompting; they’ll be constantly analyzing our preferences, informing and advising us, and then executing our wishes according to what they learn. Now they’re the kind of AI tools I could really put to good use!

Disclosure: PCWorld accepted travel and accommodation to the HP Amplify Conference in order to view and try out HP products that were being released and not physically available in the author’s location.