Huang’s comments came after a significant sell-off in global software stocks, which was in part due to Anthropic’s updated chatbot release last week. Since then, anxieties over AI-driven disruption in the data and professional services industry have been heightened.

Speaking at the Summit in San Francisco, Huang said worries that AI will make software companies less relevant are misguided, before stating that AI will keep relying on existing software instead of rebuilding basic tools from scratch.

“There’s this notion that the tool in the software industry is in decline, and will be replaced by AI … It is the most illogical thing in the world, and time will prove itself,” he said.

“If you were a human or robot, artificial, general robotics, would you use tools or reinvent tools? The answer, obviously, is to use tools… That’s why the latest breakthroughs in AI are about tool use, because the tools are designed to be explicit.”

Huang also remained firm in his belief that AI is reshaping the computing industry and “reinventing computing for the first time in 60 years,” suggesting that businesses worldwide should move quickly to adopt it – even if short-term return on investment is limited.

He described a shift from explicit programming to “implicit programming” where, instead of developers writing code and defining variables, users can state intent and the system can determine how to achieve it.

Suggesting that enterprise AI adoption had lagged because early systems were more “interesting and curious” rather than useful, Huang described the next phase as “agentic AI,” enabling faster tasks and unlimited capabilities and that companies without this mindset are in danger of being outpaced by newer, faster competitors.

His comments came the same day as Bloomberg News reported that Nvidia is nearing a deal to invest in OpenAI as part of its latest funding round.

The company behind ChatGPT is looking to raise up to $100 billion in funding, with industry giants like Amazon and SoftBank Group Corp racing to be close partners, as they seek to be more competitive in the global AI race.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also spoke at the Cisco AI Summit yesterday to make a case for AI agents, given that the AI startup launched its Codex app the day before. He suggested that the company is planning for a world where demand will grow at an accelerated place every year.

“The capability of AI feels to me the biggest it’s ever been,” Altman said. “Companies that are not set up to quickly adopt AI workers will be at a huge disadvantage. And it’s going to take a lot of work and some risk.”

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