Nvidia chief makes case for AI-first companies

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. ORLANDO, Fla.—Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang told thousands of business technology leaders that their companies must become artificial intelligence-powered organizations to prepare for what he calls a “new industrial revolution." Huang spoke onstage at market research and consulting firm Gartner’s IT Symposium/Xpo event in Orlando on Tuesday, making the case that chief executives and chief information officers simply need to get started with AI, and the rest will follow.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip giant has applied that mindset already, Huang said, putting AI to work in areas such as designing chips, writing software and managing its supply chain. The most important takeaway for CIOs, Huang told The Wall Street Journal at the event, is to find something effective inside their companies, and ask how AI can transform that work.

For Nvidia, those three areas “move the needle most profoundly," he said. “When it’s our most impactful work, it’s easiest to get energy around it." Huang was interviewed onstage by Daryl Plummer, a distinguished vice president, chief of research and fellow at Gartner.

In the long term, Nvidia is creating what Huang calls its own “AI brain." That’s the idea that knowledge of how a company works, its business processes and customer interactions need to be collected and turned over to AI. The end goal is to turn that information into an AI that CIOs and CEOs “can just talk to," Huang said.

Nvidia has already started turning all of its private data into an AI, Huang said, adding that “everybody should do that." In service of that goal, the company is announcing a tool that makes PDF files easier for AI to understand and ingest, Huang said. For the most